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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



ON THE ART OF WRITING 



ON THE ART OF WRITING 



BY 
SIR ARTHUR QUILLER-COUCH, M.A. 

Fellow of Jesus College 
King Edward VII Professor of English Literature 



» 



New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons 

Cambridge, England: University Press 

1916 






Copyright, 191 6 

BY 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 




I 

Ube Iftnfcfeerbocfeet ipress, "ftew Jgorfc 

APR 19 1916 
©CI;A428587 



Go 
JOHN HAY LOBBAN 



PREFACE 

By recasting this series of lectures, which were 
delivered in the University of Cambridge in 1913- 
1 9 14, I might with pains have turned them into a 
smooth treatise. But I prefer to leave them (bat- 
ing a very few corrections and additions) as they 
were delivered. If, as the reader will all too easily 
detect, they abound no less in repetitions than in 
arguments dropped and left at loose ends — the 
whole bewraying a man called unexpectedly to a 
post where in the act of adapting himself, of learn- 
ing that he might teach, he had often to adjourn his 
main purpose and skirmish with difficulties — they 
will be the truer to life; and so may experimentally 
enforce their preaching, that the Art of Writing 
is a living business. 

Bearing this in mind, the reader will perhaps 
excuse certain small vivacities, sallies that meet 
fools with their folly, masking the main attack. 
That, we will see, is serious enough; and others will 
carry it on, though my effort come to naught. 

It amounts to this — Literature is not a mere 
Science, to be studied ; but an Art, to be practised. 
Great as is our own literature, we must consider 
it as a legacy to be improved. Any nation that 



vi Preface 

potters with any glory of its past, as a thing dead 
and done for, is to that extent renegade. If that 
be granted, not all our pride in a Shakespeare can 
excuse the relaxation of an effort — however vain 
and hopeless — to better him, or some part of him. 
If, with all our native exemplars to give us courage, 
we persist in striving to write well, we can easily 
resign to other nations all the secondary fame to 
be picked up by commentators. 

Recent history has strengthened, with passion 
and scorn, the faith in which I wrote the following 
pages. 

Arthur Quiller-Couch. 

November, 19 15. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. — Inaugural ■ . . . i - 

II. — The Practice of Writing . 26 * 

III. — On the Difference between Verse 

and Prose 52 

IV. — On the Capital Difficulty of Verse . 76 

V. — Interlude: On Jargon . . . 100 

VI. — On the Capital Difficulty of Prose. 127 ; 

VII. — Some Principles Reaffirmed . .153 

VIII. — On the Lineage of English Litera- 
ture (I) .... 176 

IX. — On the Lineage of English Litera- 
ture (II) ..... 201 

X. — English Literature in our Uni- 
versities (I) 230 

XL — English Literature in our Uni- 
versities (II) .... 258 

XIL— On Style 278 

Index 299 



vu 



On the Art of Writing 



Inaugural 

In all the long quarrel set between philosophy 
and poetry I know of nothing finer, as of nothing 
more pathetically hopeless, than Plato's return 
upon himself in his last dialogue, The Laws. There 
are who find that dialogue (left unrevised) insuf- 
ferably dull, as no doubt it is without form and 
garrulous. But I think they will read it with a 
new tolerance, maybe even with a touch of feel- 
ing, if upon second thoughts they recognise in its 
twistings and turnings, its prolixities and repeti- 
tions, the scruples of an old man who, knowing 
that his time in this world is short, would not go 
out of it pretending to know more than he does, 
and even in matters concerning which he was once 
very sure has come to divine that, after all, as 
Renan says, "La Verite consiste dans les nuances." 



2 On the Art of Writing 

Certainly "the mind's dark cottage battered and 
decayed" does in that last dialogue admit some 
wonderful flashes, 

For Heaven descended to the low-roofed house 
Of Socrates, 

or rather to that noble "banquet-hall deserted" 
which aforetime had entertained Socrates. 

Suffer me, Mr. Vice- Chancellor and Gentlemen, 
before reaching my text, to remind you of the 
characteristically beautiful setting. The place 
is Crete, and the three interlocutors — Cleinias a 
Cretan, Megillus a Lacedaemonian, and an Athenian 
stranger — have joined company on a pilgrimage 
to the cave and shrine of Zeus, from whom Minos, 
first lawgiver of the island, had reputedly derived 
not only his parentage but much parental instruc- 
tion. Now the day being hot, even scorching, 
and the road from Cnossus to the Sacred Cave a 
long one, our three pilgrims, who have forgathered 
as elderly men, take it at their leisure and propose 
to beguile it with talk upon Minos and his laws. 
"Yes, and on the way," promises the Cretan, "we 
shall come to cypress-groves exceedingly tall and 
fair, and to green meadows, where we may repose 
ourselves and converse." "Good," assents the 
Athenian. "Ay, very good indeed, and better 



Inaugural 3 

still when we arrive^ at them. Let us push 



on." 



So they proceed. I have said that all three are 
elderly men; that is, men who have had their op- 
portunities, earned their wages, and so nearly 
earned their discharge that now, looking back on 
life, they can afford to see Man for what he really 
is — at his best a noble plaything for the gods. 
Yet they look forward, too, a little wistfully. 
They are of the world, after all, and nowise so 
tired of it, albeit disillusioned, as to have lost in- 
terest in the game or in the young who will carry 
it on. So Minos and his laws soon get left behind, 
and the talk (as so often befalls with Plato) is of 
the perfect citizen and how to train him — of edu- 
cation, in short; and so, as ever with Plato, we 
are back at length upon the old question which he 
could never get out of his way — What to do with 
the poets? 

It scarcely needs to be said that the Athenian 
has taken hold of the conversation, and that the 
others are as wax in his hands. "O Athenian 
stranger," Cleinias addresses him — "inhabitant of 
Attica I will not call you, for you seem to de- 
serve rather the name of Athene herself, because 
you go back to first principles." Thus compli- 
mented, the stranger lets himself go. Yet some- 



4 On the Art of Writing 

how he would seem to have lost speculative 
nerve. 

It was all very well in the " Republic/ ' the ideal 
State, to be bold and declare for banishing poetry 
altogether. But elderly men have given up pur- 
suing ideals; they have "seen too many leaders of 
revolt." Our Athenian is driving now at practice 
(as we say), at a well-governed State realisable 
on earth; and after all it is hard to chase out the 
poets, especially if you yourself happen to be 
something of a poet at heart. Hear, then, the 
terms on which after allowing that comedies may 
be performed, but only by slaves and hirelings, 
he proceeds to allow serious poetry 

And if any of the serious poets, as they are termed, 
who write tragedy, come to us and say, "O strangers, 
may we go to your city and country, or may we not, 
and shall we bring with us our poetry? what is your 
will about these matters?" — how shall we answer the 
divine men? I think that our answer should be as 
follows : — 

"Best of strangers," we will say to them, "we also, 
according to our ability, are tragic poets, and our 
tragedy is the best and noblest; for our whole state 
is an imitation of the best and noblest life. . . . You 
are poets and we are poets, both makers of the same 
strains, rivals and antagonists in the noblest of dramas, 
which true law alone can perfect, as our hope is. Do 
not then suppose that we shall all in a moment allow 



Inaugural 5 

you to erect your stage in the Agora, and introduce 
the fair voices of your actors, speaking above our 
own, and permit you to harangue our women and 
children and the common people in language other 
than our own, and very often the opposite of our own. 
For a State would be mad which gave you this license, 
until the magistrates had determined whether your 
poetry might be recited and was fit for publication or 
not. Wherefore, O ye sons and scions of the softer 
Muses! first of all show your songs to the Magistrates 
and let them compare them with our own, and if they 
are the same or better, we will give you a chorus; but 
if not, then, my friends, we cannot. " 

Lame conclusion! Impotent compromise! How 
little applicable, at all events, to our Common- 
wealth! though, to be sure (you may say) we 
possess a relic of it in His Majesty's Licenser of 
Plays. As you know, there has been so much 
heated talk of late over the composition of the 
County Magistracy ; yet I give you a countryman's 
word, sir, that I have heard many names proposed 
for the Commission of the Peace, and on many 
grounds, but never one on the ground that its 
owner had a conservative taste in verse ! 

Nevertheless, as Plato saw, we must deal with 
these poets somehow. It is possible (though not 
I think, likely) that in the ideal State there would 
be no literature, as it is certain there would be 
no professors of it; but since its invention men 



6 On the Art of Writing 

have never been able to rid themselves of it for 
any length of time. Tamen usque recurrit. They 
may forbid Apollo, but still he comes leading his 
choir, the Nine: 

"AxXy]to<; yiv £Y(i)*]fs ^evoi^f xev kq 8s xaXeuvrwv 
©ocpaiqaaq Mocaaiat auv ayiSTspaiaiv ixotpiocv. 

And he may challenge us English boldly! For 
since Chaucer, at any rate, he and his train have 
never been axX-rjiot to us — least of all here in 
Cambridge. 

Nay, we know that he should be welcome. 
Cardinal Newman, proposing the idea of a uni- 
versity to the Roman Catholics of Dublin, lamented 
that the English language had not, like the Greek, 
"some definite words to express, simply and gen- 
erally intellectual proficiency or perfection, such 
as 'health/ as used with reference to the animal 
frame, and 'virtue,' with reference to our moral 
nature." Well, it is a reproach to us that we do 
not possess the term : and perhaps again a reproach 
to us that our attempts at it — the word "culture" 
for instance — have been apt to take on some soil 
of controversy, some connotative damage from 
over-preaching on the one hand and impatience 
on the other. But we do earnestly desire the 
thing. We do prize that grace of intellect which 



Inaugural 7 

sets So-and-so in our view as "a scholar and a 
gentleman/* We do wish as many sons of this 
University as may be to carry forth that lifelong 
stamp from her precincts ; and — this is my point — 
from our notion of such a man the touch of literary 
grace cannot be excluded. I put to you for a test 
Lucian's description of his friend Demonax: 

His way was like other people's; he mounted no 
high horse; he was just a man and a citizen. He in- 
dulged in no Socratic irony. But his discourse was 
full of Attic grace; those who heard it went away 
neither disgusted by servility, nor repelled by ill- 
tempered censure, but on the contrary lifted out of 
themselves by charity, and encouraged to more 
orderly, contented, hopeful lives. 

I put it to you, sir, that Lucian needs not to say 
another word, but we know that Demonax had 
loved letters, and partly by aid of them had 
arrived at being such a man. No; by consent of 
all, literature is a nurse of noble natures, and right 
reading makes a full man in a sense even better 
than Bacon's; not replete, but complete rather, 
to the pattern for which Heaven designed him. 
In this conviction, in this hope, public-spirited 
men endow chairs in our universities, sure that 
literature is a good thing if only we can bring it 
to operate on young minds. 



8 On the Art of Writing 

That he has in him some power to guide such 
operation a man must believe before accepting 
such a chair as this. And now, sir, the terrible 
moment is come when your £evo<; must render 
some account — I will not say of himself, for that 
cannot be attempted — but of his business here. 
Well, first let me plead that while you have been 
infinitely kind to the stranger, feasting him and 
casting a gown over him, one thing not all your 
kindness has been able to do. With precedents, 
with traditions such as other professors enjoy, 
you could not furnish him. The Chair is a new 
one, or almost new, and for the present would • 
seem to float in the void, like Mahomet's coffin. 
Wherefore, being one who (in my Lord Chief 
Justice Crewe's phrase) would "take hold of a 
twig or a twine-thread to uphold it"; being also 
prone (with Bacon) to believe that "the counsels 
to which Time hath not been called, Time will not 
ratify"; I do assure you that, had any legacy of 
guidance been discovered among the papers left 
by my predecessor, it would have been eagerly 
welcomed and as piously honoured. O, trust me, 
sir ! — if any design for this Chair of English Litera- 
ture had been left by Dr. Verrall, it is not I who 
would be setting up any new stage in your agora ! 
But in his papers — most kindly searched for me 



Inaugural 9 

by Mrs. Verrall — no such design can be found. 
He was, in truth, a stricken man when he came 
to the chair, and of what he would have built we 
can only be sure that, had it been this or had it 
been that, it would infallibly have borne the im- 
press of one of the most beautiful minds of our 
generation. The gods saw otherwise; and for me, 
following him, I came to a trench and stretched 
my hands to a shade. 

For me, then, if you put questions concerning 
the work of this chair, I must take example from 
the artist in Don Quixote, who being asked what 
he was painting answered modestly, "That is as 
it may turn out." The course is uncharted, and 
for sailing directions I have but these words of 
your ordinance. 

It shall be the duty of the Professor to deliver courses 
of lectures on English Literature from the age of 
Chaucer onwards, and otherwise to promote, so far 
as may be in his power, the study in the University 
of the subject of English Literature. 

And I never even knew that English literature 
had a "subject"; or, rather, supposed it to have 
several ! To resume : 

The Professor shall treat this subject on literary 
and critical rather than on philological and linguistic 
lines: 



io On the Art of Writing 

— a proviso which at any rate cuts off a cantle, 
large in itself, if not comparatively, of the new 
professor's ignorance. But I ask you to note the 
phrase "to promote, so far as may be in his power, 
the study" — not, you will observe, "to teach"; 
for this absolves me from raising at the start a 
question of some delicacy for me, as Green launched 
his Prolegomena to Ethics upon the remark that 
"an author who seeks to gain general confidence 
scarcely goes the right way to work when he begins 
with asking whether there really is such a subject 
as that of which he proposes to treat." In spite 
of — mark, pray, that I say in spite of — the activity 
of many learned professors, some doubt does lurk 
in the public mind, if, after all, English Literature 
can, in any ordinary sense, be taught, and if the 
attempts to teach it do not, after all, justify (as 
Wisdom is so often justified of her grandparents) 
the silent sapience of those old benefactors who 
abstained from endowing any such Chairs. 

But that the study of English literature can 
be promoted in young minds by an elder one, that 
their zeal may be encouraged, their tastes directed, 
their vision cleared, quickened, enlarged — this, 
I take it, no man of experience will deny. Nay, 
since our two oldest universities have a habit of 
marking one another with interest — an interest, 



Inaugural n 

indeed, sometimes heightened by nervousness— 
I may point out that all this has been done of late 
years, and eminently done, by a Cambridge man 
you gave to Oxford. This, then, Mr. Vice-Chan- 
cellor — this or something like this, Gentlemen — 
is to be my task if I have the good fortune to win 
your confidence. 

Let me, then, lay down two or three principles 
by which I propose to be guided, (i) For the 
first principle of all I put to you that in studying 
any work of genius we should begin by taking it 
absolutely: that is to say, with minds intent on 
discovering just what the author's mind intended; 
this being at once the obvious approach to its 
meaning (it's ?h xi -qv elvat, the " thing it was to 
be"), and the merest duty of politeness we owe- 
to the great man addressing us. We should lay 
our minds open to what he wishes to tell, and if 
what he has to tell be noble and high and beautiful, 
we should surrender and let soak our minds in it. 

Pray understand that in claiming, even insisting 
upon, the first place for this absolute study of a 
great work I use no disrespect towards those 
learned scholars whose labours will help you, 
Gentlemen, to enjoy it afterwards, in other ways 
and from other aspects; since I hold there is no 
surer sign of intellectual ill-breeding than to speak, 



12 On the Art of Writing 

even to feel, slightingly of any knowledge oneself 
does not happen to possess. Still less do I aim 
to persuade you that any one should be able to 
earn a Cambridge degree by the process (to borrow 
Macaulay's phrase) of reading our great authors 
1 'with his feet on the hob," a posture I have not 
even tried, to recommend it for a contemplative 
man's recreation. These editors not only set us 
the priceless example of learning for learning's 
sake : but even in practice they clear our texts for 
us, and afterwards — when we go more minutely 
into our author's acquaintance, wishing to learn 
all we can about him — by increasing our know- 
ledge of detail they enhance our delight. Nay, 
with certain early writers — say Chaucer or Dun- 
bar, as with certain highly allusive ones — Bacon, or 
Milton, or Sir Thomas Browne — some apparatus 
must be supplied from the start. But on the whole 
I think it a fair contention that such helps to 
studying an author are secondary and subsidiary; 
that, for example, with any author who by con- 
sent is less of his age than for all time, to study 
the relation he bore to his age may be important 
indeed, and even highly important, yet must in 
the nature of things be of secondary importance, 
not of the first. 

But let us examine this principle a little more 



Inaugural 13 

attentively — for it is the palmary one. As I con- 
ceive it. that understanding of literature which 
we desire in our Euphues, our gracefully- minded 
youth, will include knowledge in varying degree, 
yet is itself something distinct from knowledge. 
Let us illustrate this upon poetry, which the most 
of us will allow to be the highest form of literary 
expression, if not of all artistic expression. Of 
all the testimony paid to poetry, none commands 
better witness than this — that, as Johnson said of 
Gray's Elegy, "it abounds with images which find 
a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to 
which every heart returns an echo . ' ' When George 
Eliot said, "I never before met with so many of 
my own feelings expressed just as I should like 
them," she but repeated of Wordsworth (in home- 
lier, more familiar fashion) what Johnson said of 
Gray; and the same testimony lies implicit in 
Emerson's fine remark that "Universal history, 
the poets, the romancers" — all good writers, in 
short — "do not anywhere make us feel that we 
intrude, that this is for our betters. Rather it is 
true that, in their greatest strokes, there we feel 
most at home." The mass of evidence, of which 
these are samples, may be summarized thus: 
As we dwell here between two mysteries, of a soul 
within and an ordered universe without, so among 



14 On the Art of Writing 

us are granted to dwell certain men of more 
delicate intellectual fibre than their fellows — men 
whose minds have, as it were, filaments to inter- 
cept, apprehend, conduct, translate home to us 
stray messages between these two mysteries, as 
modern telegraphy has learnt to search out, snatch, 
gather home human messages astray over waste 
waters of the ocean. 

If, then, the ordinary man be done this service 
by the poet, that (as Dr. Johnson defines it) "he 
feels what he remembers to have felt before, but 
he feels it with a great increase of sensibility" ; or 
even if, though the message be unfamiliar, it 
suggest to us, in Wordsworth's phrase, to "feel 
that we are greater than we know," I submit that 
we respond to it less by anything that usually 
passes for knowledge, than by an improvement of 
sensibility, a tuning up of the mind to the poet's 
pitch; so that the man we are proud to send forth 
from our schools will be remarkable less for some- 
thing he can take out of his wallet and exhibit 
for knowledge, than for being something, and that 
" something* ' a man of unmistakable intellectual 
breeding, whose trained judgment we can trust 
to choose the better and reject the worse. 

But since this refining of the critical judgment 
happens to be less easy of practice than the memo- 



Inaugural 15 

rising of much that passes for knowledge — of what 
happened to Harriet or what Blake said to the 
soldier — and far less easy to examine on, the peda- 
gogic mind (which I implore you not to suppose 
me confusing with the scholarly) for avoidance of 
trouble tends all the while to dodge or obfuscate 
what is essential, piling up accidents and irrele- 
vancies before it until its very face is hidden. 
And we should be the more watchful not to confuse 
the pedagogic mind with the scholarly since it is 
from the scholar that the pedagogue pretends to 
derive his sanction; ransacking the great genuine 
commentators — be it a Skeat or a Masson or (may 
I add for old reverence' sake?) an Aldis Wright 
— fetching home bits of erudition, non sua poma, 
and announcing, "This must be the true Sion, for 
we found it in a wood." 

Hence a swarm of little school books pullulates 
annually, all upside down and wrong from begin- 
ning to end; and hence a worse evil afflicts us, 
that the English schoolboy starts with a false per- 
spective of any given masterpiece, his pedagogue 
urging, obtruding lesser things upon his vision 
until what is really important, the poem or the 
play itself, is seen in distorted glimpses, if not 
quite blocked out of view. 

This same temptation — to remove a work of 



16 On the Art of Writing 

art from the category for which the author de- 
signed it into another where it can be more 
conveniently studied — reaches even above the 
schoolmaster to assail some very eminent critics. 
I cite an example from a book of which I shall here- 
after have to speak with gratitude as I shall al- 
ways name it with respect — The History of English 
Poetry, by Dr. Courthope, sometime Professor of 
Poetry at Oxford. In his fourth volume, and in 
his estimate of Fletcher as a dramatist, I find this 
passage: 

But the crucial test of a play's quality is only applied 
when it is read. So long as the illusion of the stage 
gives credit to the action, and the words and gestures 
of the actor impose themselves on the imagination of 
the spectator, the latter will pass over a thousand im- 
perfections, which reveal themselves to the reader, 
who, as he has to satisfy himself with the drama of 
silent images, will not be content if this or that in any 
way fall short of his conception of truth and nature, 

— which seems equivalent to saying that the cru- 
cial test of the frieze of the Parthenon is its adapt- 
ability to an apartment in Bloomsbury. So long 
as the illusion of the Acropolis gave credit to 
Pheidias's design, and the sunlight of Attica im- 
posed its delicate intended shadows edging the 
reliefs, the countrymen of Pericles might be 



Inaugural 17 

tricked; but the visitor to the British Museum, 
as he has to satisfy himself with what happens 
indoors in the atmosphere of the West Central 
Postal Division of London, will not be content if 
Pheidias in any way fall short of his conception 
of truth and nature. Yet Fletcher (I take it) 
constructed his plays as plays; the illusion of the 
stage, the persuasiveness of the actor's voice, 
were conditions for which he wrought, and on 
which he had a right to rely; and, in short, any 
critic behaves uncritically who, distrusting his 
imagination to recreate the play as a play, elects 
to consider it in the category of something else. 

In sum, if the great authors never oppress us 
with airs of condescension, but, like the great lords 
they are, put the meanest of us at our ease in their 
presence, Isee no reason why we should pay to 
any commentator a servility not demanded by his 
master. 

My next two principles may be more briefly 
stated. 

(2) I propose next, then, that since our in- 
vestigations will deal largely with style, that curi- 
ously personal thing; and since (as I have said) 
they cannot in their nature be readily brought to 
rule-of- thumb tests, and may therefore so easily 
be suspected of evading all tests, of being mere 



18 On the Art of Writing 

dilettantism ; I propose (I say) that my pupils and 
I rebuke this suspicion by constantly aiming at 
the concrete, at the study of such definite beauties 
as we can see presented in print under our eyes; 
always seeking the author's intention, but eschew- 
ing, for the present at any rate, all general defini- 
tions and theories, through the sieve of which the 
particular achievement of genius is so apt to slip. 
And having excluded them at first in prudence, 
I make little doubt we shall go on to exclude them 
in pride. Definitions, formulae (some would add, 
creeds) have their use in any society in that they 
restrain the ordinary unintellectual man from 
making himself a public nuisance with his private 
opinions. But they go a very little way in helping 
the man who has a real sense of prose or verse. 
In other words, they are good discipline for some 
thyrsus-bearers, but the initiated have little use 
for them. As Thomas a Kempis "would rather 
feel compunction than understand the definition 
thereof,' ! so the initiated man will say of the 
"Grand Style," for example — "Why define it for 
me ? ' ' When Viola says simply : 

I am all the daughters of my father's house, 
And aii the brothers too, 

or Macbeth demands of the Doctor 



Inaugural 19 

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, 
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow . . . ? 

or Hamlet greets Ophelia, reading her Book of 
Hours, with 

Nymph, in thy orisons 
Be all my sins remembered! 

or when Milton tells of his dead friend how 

Together both, ere the high lawns appear'd 
Under the opening eyelids of the morn, 
We drove afield, 

or describes the battalions of Heaven 

On they move 
Indissolubly firm: nor obvious hill, 
Nor strait'ning vale, nor wood, nor stream divide 
Their perfect ranks, 

or when Gray exalts the great commonplace 

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, 
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, 

Await alike th' inevitable hour; 

The paths of glory lead but to the grave, 

or when Keats casually drops us such a line as 

The journey homeward to habitual self, 

or, to come down to our own times and to a living 
poet, when I open on a page of William Watson 
and read 



20 On the Art of Writing 

O ancient streams, O far descended woods, 
Full of the fluttering of melodious souls! . 



"why then (will say the initiated one), why worry 
me with any definition of the Grand Style in 
English, when here, and here, and again here — 
in all these lines, simple or intense or exquisite or 
solemn — I recognise and feel the thing ?" 

Indeed, sir, the long and the short of the argu- 
ment lie just here. Literature is not an abstract 
science, to which exact definitions can be applied. 
It is an art rather, the success of which depends 
on personal persuasiveness, on the authors skill 
to give as on ours to receive. 

(3) For our third principle I will ask you to go 
back with me to Plato's wayfarers, whom we have 
left so long under the cypresses; and loth as we 
must be to lay hands on our father Parmenides, 
I feel we must treat the gifted Athenian stranger 
to a little manhandling. For did you not observe 
— though Greek was a living language and to his 
metropolitan mind the only language — how envious 
he showed himself to seal up the w r ell, or allow it 
to trickle only under permit of a public analyst: 
to treat all innovation as suspect, even as, a 
hundred odd years ago, the Lyrical Ballads were 
suspect? 



Inaugural 21 

But the very hope of this chair, sir (as I con- 
ceive it), relies on the courage of the young. As 
literature is an art and therefore not to be pon- 
dered only, but practised, so ours is a living lan- 
guage and therefore to be kept alive, supple, active 
in all honourable use. The orator can yet sway 
men, the poet ravish them, the dramatist fill their 
lungs with salutary laughter or purge their emo- 
tions by pity or terror. The historian "superin- 
duces upon events the charm of order." The 
novelist — well, even the novelist has his uses; and 
I would warn you against despising any form of 
art which is alive and pliant in the hands of men. 
For my part, I believe, bearing in mind Mr. Barrie's 
Peter Pan and the old bottles he renovated to 
hold that joyous wine, that even musical comedy, 
in the hands of a master, might become a thing 
of beauty. Of the novel, at any rate — whether 
we like it or not — we have to admit that it does 
hold a commanding position in the literature of 
our times, and to consider how far Mr. Lascelles 
Abercrombie was right the other day when he 
claimed, on the first page of his brilliant study 
of Thomas Hardy, that "the right to such a posi- 
tion is not to be disputed; for here, as elsewhere, 
the right to a position is no more than the power 
to maintain it." You may agree with that or you 



22 On the Art of Writing 

may not ; you may or may not deplore the forms 
that literature is choosing nowadays; but there 
is no gainsaying that it is still very much alive. 
And I would say to you, Gentlemen, "Believe, 
and be glad that literature and the English tongue 
are both alive/ ' Carlyle, in his explosive way, 
once demanded of his countrymen, "Shakespeare 
or India? If you had to surrender one to retain 
the other, which would you choose? " Well, our 
Indian Empire is yet in the making, while the 
works of Shakespeare are complete and purchas- 
able in whole calf; so the alternatives are scarcely 
in pari materia ; and moreover let us not be in a 
hurry to meet trouble half way. But in English 
literature, which, like India, is still in the making, 
you have at once an empire and an emprise. 
In that alone you have inherited something greater 
than Sparta. Let us strive, each in his little way, 
to adorn it. 

But here at the close of my hour, the double 
argument, that literature is an art and English 
a living tongue, has led me right up to a fourth 
principle, the plunge into which (though I foresaw 
it from the first) all the coward in me rejoices at 
having to defer to another lecture. I conclude 
then, Gentlemen, by answering two suspicions, 
which very likely have been shaping themselves 



Inaugural 23 

in your minds. In the first place, you will say, 
"It is all very well for this man to talk about 
' cultivating an increased sensibility,* and the 
like ; but we know what that leads to — to quackery, 
to aesthetic chatter: 'Isn't this pretty? Don't 
you admire that?'" Well, I am not greatly 
frightened. To begin with, when we come to 
particular criticism I shall endeavour to exchange 
it with you in plain terms; a manner which (to 
quote Mr. Robert Bridges's Essay on Keats) "I 
prefer, because by obliging the lecturer to say 
definitely what he means, it makes his mistakes 
easy to point out, and in this way the true business 
of criticism is advanced." But I have a second 
safeguard, more to be trusted: that here in Cam- 
bridge, with all her traditions of austere scholar- 
ship, any one who indulges in loose discinct talk 
will be quickly recalled to his tether. Though 
at the time Athene be not kind enough to descend 
from heaven and pluck him backward by the hair, 
yet the very genius loci will walk home with him 
from the lecture room, whispering monitions, 
cruel to be kind. 

"But," you will say alternatively, "if we avoid 
loose talk on these matters we are embarking on 
a mighty difficult business." Why, to be sure we 
are; and that, I hope, will be half the enjoyment. 



24 On the Art of Writing 

After all, we have a number of critics among 
whose methods we may search for help — from the 
Persian monarch who, haying to adjudicate upon 
two poems, caused the one to be read to him, and 
at once, without ado, awarded the prize to the 
other, up to the great Frenchman whom I shall 
finally invoke to sustain my hope of building 
something; that is if you, Gentlemen, will be con- 
tent to accept me less as a professor than as an 
elder brother. 

The Frenchman is Sainte-Beuve, and I pay a 
debt, perhaps appropriately here, by quoting him 
as translated by the friend of mine, now dead, who 
first invited me to Cambridge and taught me to 
admire her — one Arthur John Butler, sometime 
a Fellow of Trinity, and later a great pioneer 
among Englishmen in the study of Dante. Thus 
while you listen to the appeal of Sainte-Beuve, I 
can hear beneath it a more intimate voice, not 
for the first time, encouraging me. 

Sainte-Beuve then — si magna licet componere 
parvis — is delivering an Inaugural Lecture in the 
Ecole Normale, the date being April 12, 1858. 
" Gentlemen,' ' he begins, "I have written a good 
deal in the last thirty years; that is, I have scat- 
tered myself a good deal ; so that I need to gather 
myself together, in order that my words may come 



Inaugural 25 

before you with all the more freedom and con- 
fidence." That is his opening; and he ends: 

As time goes on, you will make me believe that I 
can for my part be of some good to you; and with the 
generosity of your age you will repay me, in that 
feeling alone, far more than I shall be able to give you 
in intellectual freedom, in literary thought. If in 
one sense I bestow on you some of my experience, 
you will requite me, and in a more profitable manner, 
by the sight of your ardour for what is noble: you 
will accustom me to turn oftener and more willingly 
towards the future in your company. You will teach 
me again to hope. , 



II 

The Practice of Writing 

We found, Gentlemen, towards the close of our 
first lecture, that the argument had drawn us, as 
by a double chain, up to the edge of a bold leap, 
over which I deferred asking you to take the 
plunge with me. Yet the plunge must be taken, 
and to-day I see nothing for it but to harden our 
hearts. 

Well, then, I propose to you that, English 
literature being (as we agreed) an art, with a living 
and therefore improvable language for its medium 
or vehicle, a part — and no small part — of our 
business is to practise it. Yes, I seriously propose 
to you that here in Cambridge we practise writing; 
that we practise it not only for our own improve- 
ment, but to make, or at least try to make, appro- 
priate, perspicuous, accurate, persuasive writing 
a recognisable hall-mark of anything turned out 
by our English School. By all means let us study 
the great writers of the past for their own sakes; 

26 



1 



The Practice of Writing 27 

but let us study them for our guidance; that we, 
in our turn, having (it is to be hoped) something 
to say in our span of time, say it worthily, not 
dwindling out the large utterance of Shakespeare 
or of Burke. Portraits of other great ones look 
down on you in your college halls; but while you 
are young and sit at the brief feast, what avails 
their serene gaze if it do not lift up your hearts 
and movingly persuade you to match your man- 
hood to its inheritance? 

I protest, Gentlemen, that if our eyes had not 
been sealed, as with wax, by the pedagogues of 
whom I spoke a fortnight ago, this one habit of 
regarding our own literature as a hortus siccus, 
this our neglect to practise good writing as the 
constant auxiliary of an Englishman's liberal 
education, would be amazing to you seated here 
to-day as it will be starkly incredible to the future 
historian of our times. Tell me, pray; if it con- 
cerned Painting — an art in which Englishmen 
boast a record far briefer, far less distinguished — 
what would you think of a similar acquiescence 
in the past, a like haste to presume the dissolution 
of aptitude and to close accounts, a like precipi- 
tancy to divorce us from the past, to rob the future 
of hope and even the present of lively interest? 
Consider, for reproof of these null men, the Dis- 



28 On the Art of Writing 

courses addressed (in a pedantic age, too) by Sir 
Joshua Reynolds to the members and students of 
the Royal Academy. He has (as you might expect) 
enough to say of Tintoretto, of Titian, of Caracci, 
and of the duty of studying their work with pa- 
tience, with humility. But why does he exhort his 
hearers to con them? — Why, because he is all the 
time driving at practice. Hear how he opens his 
second Discourse (his first to the students). 
After congratulating the prize-winners of 1769, 
he desires "to lead them into such a course of 
study as may render their future progress answer- 
able to their past improvement"; and the great 
man goes on: 

I flatter myself that from the long experience I have 
had, and the necessary assiduity with which I have 
pursued these studies in which like you I have been 
engaged, I shall be acquitted of vanity in offering 
some hints to your consideration. They are indeed 
in a great degree founded upon my own mistakes in 
the same pursuit. . . . 

Mark the noble modesty of that ! To resume — 

In speaking to you of the Theory of the Art, I shall 
only consider it as it has relation to the method of 
your studies. 

And then he proceeds to preach the Old Masters. 
— But how? — why? — to what end? Does he 



The Practice of Writing 29 

recite lists of names, dates, with formulae con- 
cerning styles? He does nothing of the sort. 
Does he recommend his old masters for copying, 
then? — for mere imitation? Not a bit of it! — 
he comes down like a hammer on copying. Then 
for what, in fine, will he have them studied? 
Listen : 

The more extensive your acquaintance is with the 
works of those who have excelled, the more extensive 
will be your power of invention. 

Yes, of invention, your power to make something 
new: 

— and what may appear still more like a paradox, 
the more original will be your conceptions. 

There spake Sir Joshua Reynolds; and I call that 
the voice of a true Elder Brother. He, standing 
face to face with the young, thought of the old 
masters mainly as spiritual begetters of practice. 
And will any one in this room tell me that what 
Reynolds said of painting is not to-day, for us, 
applicable to writing? 

We accept it of Greek and Latin. An old sixth 
form master once said to me: "You may give up 
Latin verse for this term, if you will; but I warn 
you, no one can be a real scholar who does not 



30 On the Art of Writing 

constantly practise verse." He was mistaken, 
belike. I hold, for my part, that in our public 
schools, we give up a quite disproportionate 
amount of time to " composition" (of Latin prose 
especially) and starve the boys' reading thereby. 
But at any rate we do give up a large share of the 
time to it. Then if we insist on this way with the 
tongues of Homer and Virgil, why do we avoid 
it with the tongue of Shakespeare, our own living 
tongue? I answer by quoting one of the simplest 
wisest sayings of Don Quixote (Gentlemen, you 
will easily, as time goes on, and we better our 
acquaintance, discover my favourite authors) : 

The great Homer wrote not in Latin, for he was a 
Greek; and Virgil wrote not in Greek, because he was 
a Latin. In brief, all the ancient poets wrote in the 
tongue which they sucked in with their mother's 
milk, nor did they go forth to seek for strange ones 
to express the greatness of their conceptions; and, 
this being so, it should be a reason for the fashion to 
extend to all nations. 

Does the difference, then, perchance lie in our- 
selves? Will you tell me, "Oh, painting is a 
special art, whereas, any one can write prose 
passably well"? Can he, indeed? — Can you, 
sir? Nay, believe me, you are either an archangel 
or a very bourgeois gentleman indeed if you admit 



The Practice of Writing 31 

to having spoken English prose all your life without 
knowing it. 

Indeed, when we try to speak prose without 
having practised it the result is apt to be worse 
than our own vernacular. How often have I heard 
some worthy fellow addressing a public audience — 
say a Parliamentary candidate who believes him- 
self a Liberal Home Ruler, and for the moment is 
addressing himself to meet some criticism of the 
financial proposals of a Home Rule Bill. His own 
vernacular would be somewhat as follows: 

Oh, rot! Give the Irish their heads and they'll 
run straight enough. Look at the Boers, don't you 
know. Not half such a decent sort as the Irish. 
Look at Irish horses, too. Eh? What? 

But this, he is conscious, would hardly suit the 
occasion. He therefore amends it thus : 

Mr. Chairman — er— as regards the financial pro- 
posals of His Majesty's Government, I am of the 
deliberate — er — opinion that our national security — 
I may say, our Imperial security — our security as — er 
— a governing people — lies in trusting the Irish as 
we did in the — er— case of the Boers — H'm Mr. 
Gladstone, Mr. Chairman — Mr. Chairman, Mr. 
Gladstone 

and so on. You perceive that the style is actually 
worse than in the sample quoted before; it has 



32 On the Art of Writing 

become flabby, whereas that other was at any rate 
nervous. But now suppose that, having practised 
it, our candidate was able to speak like this : 

"But what," says the financier, "is peace to us 
without money? Your plan gives us no revenue." 
No? But it does — for it secures to the subject the 
power of refusal, the first of all revenues. Experi- 
ence is a cheat, and fact is a liar, if this power in the 
subject of proportioning his grant, or of not granting 
at all, has not been found the richest mine of reve- 
nue ever discovered by the skill or by the fortune of 
man. It does not indeed vote you £152,750 lis. 2^4 d. f 
nor any other paltry Jimited sum — but it gives you 
the strong box itself, the fund, the bank, from whence 
only revenues can arise among a people sensible of 
freedom: Posita luditur area. ... Is this principle 
to be true in England, and false everywhere else? 
Is it not true in Ireland? Has it not hitherto been 
true in the Colonies? Why should you presume that 
in any country a body duly constituted for any func- 
tion will neglect to perform its duty and abdicate its 
trust? Such a presumption would go against all 
Government in all nations. But in truth this dread 
of penury of supply, from a free assembly, has no 
foundation in nature. For first, observe that, besides 
the desire which all men have naturally of supporting 
the honour of their own Government, that sense of 
dignity, and that security of property, which ever 
attend freedom, have a tendency to increase the stock 
of a free community. Most may be taken where 
most is accumulated. And what is the soil or 
climate where experience has not uniformly proved 



The Practice of Writing 33 

that the voluntary flow of heaped-up plenty, bursting 
from the weight of its own luxuriance, has ever run 
with a more copious stream of revenue than could be 
squeezed from the dry husks of oppressed indigence 
by the straining of all the politic machinery, in the 
world? 



That, whether you agree or disagree with its 
doctrine, is great prose. That is Burke. "O 
Athenian stranger," said the Cretan I quoted in my 
first lecture, — "inhabitant of Attica I will not 
call you, since you deserve the name of Athene 
herself, because you go back to first principles!" 

But, you may object, "Burke is talking like a 
book, and I have no wish to talk like a book." 
Well, as a fact, Burke is here at the culmen of a 
long sustained argument, and his language has 
soared with it, as his way was — logic and emotion 
lifting him together as upon two balanced majestic 
wings. But you are shy of such heights? Very 
well again, and all credit to your modesty! Yet 
at least (I appeal to that same modesty) when you 
talk or write, you would wish to observe the occasion; 
to say what you have to say without impertinence 
or ill-timed excess. You would not harangue a 
drawing-room or a sub-committee, or be facetious 
at a funeral, or play the skeleton at a banquet; 
for in all such conduct you would be mixing up 



34 On the Art of Writing 

things that differ. Be cheerful, then, for this 
desire of yours to be appropriate is really the root 
of the matter. Nor do I ask you to accept this 
on my sole word, but will cite you the most respect- 
able witnesses. Take, for instance, a critic who 
should be old enough to impress you — Dionysius 
of Halicarnassus. After enumerating the quali- 
ties which lend charm and nobility to style,Jhe 
closes the list with "appropriateness, which all 
these need": 

As there is a charming diction, so there is another 
that is noble; as there is a polished rhythm, so there 
is another that is dignified; as variety adds grace in 
one passage, so in another it adds fulness; and as for 
appropriateness, it will prove the chief source of beauty, 
or else of nothing at all. 

Or listen to Cicero, how he sets appropriateness 
in the very heart of his teaching, as the master 
secret : 

Is erit eloquens qui poterit parva summisse, modica 
temperate, magna graviter dicere. . . . Qui ad id 
quodcunque decebit poterit accommodare orationem. 
Quod quum statuerit, turn, ut quidque erit dicendum, 
ita dicet, nee satura jejune, nee grandia minute, nee 
item contra, sed erit rebus ipsis par et aequalis oratio. 

— "Whatever his theme he will speak as becomes 
it; neither meagrely where it is copious, nor meanly 



The Practice of Writing 35 

where it is ample, not in this way where it demands 
that; but keeping his speech level with the actual 
subject and adequate to it." 

I might quote another great man, Quintilian, 
to you on the first importance of this appropriate- 
ness, or " propriety "; of speaking not only to the 
purpose but becomingly — though the two (as he 
rightly says) are often enough one and the same 
thing. But I will pass on to what has ever seemed, 
since I found it in one of Jowett's Introductions to 
Plato, the best definition known to me of good 
style in literature : 

The perfection of style is variety in unity, freedom, 
ease, clearness, the power of saying anything, and of 
striking any note in the scale of human feelings, 
without impropriety. 

You see, O my modest friend! that your gamut 
needs not to be very wide, to begin with. The 
point is that within it you learn to play 
becomingly. 

Now I started by proposing that we try together 
to make appropriate, perspicuous, accurate, per- 
suasive writing a hall-mark of anything turned 
out by our English School here, and I would add 
(growing somewhat hardier) a hall-mark of all 
Cambridge style so far as our English School can 



36 On the Art of Writing 

influence it. I chose these four epithets accurate, 
perspicuous, persuasive, appropriate, with some 
care of course, as my duty was; and will assume 
that by this time we are agreed to desire appro- 
priateness. Now for the other three : 

Perspicuity. — I shall waste no words on the need 
of this : since the first aim of speech is to be under- 
stood. The more clearly you write the more 
easily and surely you will be understood. I pro- 
pose to demonstrate to you further, in a minute 
or so, that the more clearly you write the more 
clearly you will understand yourself. But a 
sufficient reason has been given in ten words why 
you should desire perspicuity. 

Accuracy. — Did I not remind myself in my first 
lecture, that Cambridge is the home of accurate 
scholarship? Surely no Cambridge man would 
willingly be a sloven in speech, oral or written? 
Surely here, if anywhere, should be acknowledged 
of all what Newman says of the classics that "a 
certain unaffected neatness and propriety and 
grace of diction may be required of any author,, 
for the same reason that a certain attention to dress 
is expected of every gentleman." After all, what 
are the chief differentiae between ma:i and the 
brute creation but that he clothes himself, that 
he cooks his food, that he uses articulate 



The Practice of Writing 37 

speech? Let us cherish and improve all these 
distinctions. 

But shall we now look more carefully into these 
twin questions of perspicuity and accuracy: for 
I think, pursuing them, we may almost reach 
the philosophic kernel of good writing. I quoted 
Newman playfully a moment ago. I am going 
to quote him in strong earnest. And here let me 
say that of all the books written in these hundred 
years there is perhaps none you can more profit- 
ably thumb and ponder than that volume of his 
in which, under the title of The Idea of a Univer- 
sity, he collected nine discourses addressed to the 
Roman Catholics of Dublin with some lectures 
delivered to the Catholic University there. It is 
fragmentary, because its themes were occasional. 
It has missed to be appraised at its true worth, 
partly no doubt by reason of the colour it derives 
from a religion still unpopular in England. But 
in fact it may be read without offence by the 
strictest Protestant; and the book is so wise — so 
eminently wise — as to deserve being bound by the 
young student of literature for a frontlet on his 
brow and a talisman on his writing wrist. 

Now you will find much pretty swordsmanship 
in its pages, but nothing more trenchant than the 
passage in which Newman assails and puts to 



38 On the Art of Writing 

rout the Persian host of infidels — I regret to say, 
for the most part men of science — who would 
persuade us that good writing, that style, is some- 
thing extrinsic to the subject, a kind of ornamen- 
tation laid on to tickle the taste, a study for the 
dilettante, but beneath the notice of their stern 
and masculine minds. 

Such a view, as he justly points out, belongs 
rather to the Oriental mind than to our civilisa- 
tion; it reminds him of the way young gentlemen 
go to work in the East when they would engage 
in correspondence with the object of their affec- 
tion. The enamoured one cannot write a sentence 
himself: he is the specialist in passion (for the 
moment); but thought and words are two things 
to him, and for words he must go to another special- 
ist, the professional letter- writer. Thus there is a 
division of labour. 



The man of words, duly instructed, dips the pen 
of desire in the ink of devotedness and proceeds to 
spread it over the page of desolation. Then the 
nightingale of affection is heard to warble to the rose 
of loveliness, while the breeze of anxiety plays around 
the brow of expectation. That is what the Easterns 
are said to consider fine writing; and it seems pretty 
much the idea of the school of critics to which I 
have been referring. 



The Practice of Writing 39 

Now hear this fine passage : 

Thought and speech are inseparable from each 
other. Matter and expression are parts of one; style 
is a thinking out into language. This is what I have 
been laying down, and this is literature; not things, 
but the verbal symbols of things; not on the other 
hand mere words; but thoughts expressed in language. 
Call to mind, gentlemen, the meaning of the Greek 
word which expresses this special prerogative of man 
over the feeble intelligence of the lower animals. It 
is called Logos; what does Logos mean? it stands both 
for reason and for speech, and it is difficult to say which 
it means more properly. It means both at once: why? 
because really they cannot be divided. . . . When 
we can separate light and illumination, life and motion, 
the convex and the concave of a curve, then will it 
be possible for thought to tread speech under foot and 
to hope to do without it — then will it be conceivable 
that the vigorous and fertile intellect should renounce 
its own double, its instrument of expression and the 
channel o£ its speculations and emotions. 

"As if," he exclaims finely, "language were the 
hired servant, the mere mistress of reason, and 
not the lawful wife in her own house!" 

If you need further argument (but what serves 
it to slay the slain?) let me remind you that you 
cannot use the briefest, the humblest process of 
thought, cannot so much as resolve to take your 
bath hot or cold, or decide what to order for break- 
fast, without forecasting it to yourself in some 



4-0 On the Art of Writing 

form of words. Words are, in fine, the only cur- 
rency in which we can exchange thought even 
with ourselves. Does it not follow, then, that the 
more accurately we use words the closer defini- 
tion we shall give to our thoughts? Does it not 
follow that by drilling ourselves to write perspicu- 
ously we train our minds to clarify their thought? 
Does it not follow that some practice in the deft 
use of words, with its correspondent defining of 
thought, may well be ancillary even to the study 
of natural science in a university? 

But I have another word for our men of science. 
It was inevitable, perhaps, that Latin — so long 
the universal language — should cease in time to 
be that in which scientific works were written. 
It was impossible, perhaps, to substitute, by con- 
sent, some equally neat and austere modern lan- 
guage, such as French. But when it became an 
accepted custom for each nation to use its own 
language in scientific treatises, it certainly was 
not foreseen that men of science would soon be 
making discoveries at a rate which left their skill 
in words outstripped; that having to invent their 
terms as they went along, yet being careless and 
contemptuous of a science in which they have no 
training, they would bombast out our dictionaries 
with monstrously invented words that not only 



The Practice of Writing 41 

would have made Quintilian stare and gasp, but 
would affront the decently literate of any age. 

After all, and though we must sigh and ac- 
quiesce in the building of Babel, we have some 
right to examine the bricks. I was waiting, the 
other day, in a doctor's anteroom, and picked up 
one of those books — it was a work on pathology — 
so thoughtfully left lying in such places; to per- 
suade us, no doubt, to bear the ills we have rather 
than fly to others capable of being illustrated. 
I found myself engaged in following the antics 
of certain bacilli generically described as " anti- 
bodies.' ' I do not accuse the author (who seemed 
to be a learned man) of having invented this abom- 
inable term; apparently it passed current among 
physiologists and he had accepted it for honest 
coin. I found it, later on, in Webster's invaluable 
dictionary: Etymology, "body" (yours or mine), 
"anti," up against it; compound, "antibody," a 
noxious microbe. 

Now I do not doubt the creature thus named 
to be a poisonous little wretch. Those who know 
him may even agree that no word is too bad for 
him. But I am not thinking of him. I am think- 
ing of us; and I say that for our own self-respect, 
whilst we retain any sense of intellectual pedigree, 
"antibody" is no word to throw even at a bacillus. 



42 On the Art of Writing 

The man who eats peas with his knife can at least 
claim a historical throwback to the days when 
forks had but two prongs and the spoons had been 
removed with the soup. But " antibody" has no 
such respectable derivation. It is, in fact, a bar- 
barism, and a mongrel at that. The man who 
uses it debases the currency of learning; and I 
suggest to you that it is one of the many functions 
of a great University to maintain the standard of 
that currency, to guard the jus et norma loquendi, 
to protect us from such hasty fellows or, rather, 
to suppeditate them in their haste. 

Let me revert to our list of the qualities neces- 
sary to good writing, and come to the last — 
Persuasiveness; of which you may say, indeed, 
that it embraces the whole — not only the qualities 
of propriety, perspicuity, accuracy, we have been 
considering, but many another, such as harmony, 
order, sublimity, beauty of diction; all in short 
that — writing being an art, not a science, and 
therefore so personal a thing — may be summed up 
under the word Charm. Who, at any rate, does 
not seek after Persuasion? It is the aim of all 
the arts, and, I suppose, of all exposition of the 
sciences; nay, of all useful exchange of converse in 
our daily life. It is what Velasquez attempts in a 
picture, Euclid in a proposition, the Prime Min- 



The Practice of Writing 43 

ister at the Treasury box, the journalist in a lead- 
ing article, our Vkar in his sermon. Persuasion, 
as Matthew Arnold once said, is the only true 
intellectual process. The mere cult of it occupied 
many of the best intellects of the ancients, such 
as Longinus and Quintilian, whose writings have 
been preserved to us just because they were 
prized. Nor can I imagine an earthly gift more 
covetable by you, Gentlemen, than that of per- 
suading your fellows to listen to your views and 
attend to what you have at heart. 

Suppose, sir, that you wish to become a jour- 
nalist? Well, and why not? Is it a small thing 
to desire the power of influencing day by day to 
better citizenship an unguessed number of men, 
using the best thought and applying it in the best 
language at your command? ... Or are you, 
perhaps, overawed by the printed book? On that, 
too, I might have a good deal to say; but for the 
moment would keep the question as practical as 
I can. 

Well, it is sometimes said that Oxford men 
make better journalists than Cambridge men, and 
some attribute this to the discipline of their great 
School of Literae Humaniores, which obliges them 
to bring up a weekly essay to their tutor, who dis- 
cusses it. Cambridge men retort that all Oxford 



44 On the Art of Writing 

men are journalists, and throw, of course, some 
accent of scorn on the word. But may I urge — 
and remember please that my credit is pledged to 
you now — may I urge that this is not a wholly 
convincing answer? For, to begin with, Oxford 
men have not changed their natures since leaving 
school, but are, by process upon lines not widely 
divergent from your own, much the same pleasant 
sensible fellows you remember. And, next if 
you truly despise journalism, why then despise 
it, have done with it and leave it alone. But I 
pray you, do not despise it if you mean to practise 
it, though it be but as a step to something better. 
For while the ways of art are hard at the best, 
they will break you if you go unsustained by 
belief in what you are trying to do. 

In asking you to practise the written word, I 
began with such low but necessary things as pro- 
priety, perspicuity, accuracy. But Persuasion 
— the highest form of persuasion at any rate 
cannot be achieved without a sense of beauty. 
And now I shoot a second rapid — I want you to 
practise verse, and to practise it assiduously. . . . 
I am quite serious. Let me remind you that, if 
there ever was an ancient state of which we of 
Great Britain have great right and should have 
greater ambition to claim ourselves the spiritual 



The Practice of Writing 45 

heirs, that state was Imperial Rome. And of the 
Romans (whom you will allow to have been a 
practical people) nothing is more certain than the 
value they set upon acquiring verse. To them 
it was not only (as Dr. Johnson said of Greek) 
"like old lace — you can never have too much of 
it." They cultivated it with a straight eye to 
national improvement. Among them, as a scholar 
reminded us the other day, you find "an edu- 
cational system deliberately and steadily directed 
towards the development of poetical talent. 
They were not a people of whom we can say, as 
we can of the Greeks, that they were born to art 
and literature. . . . The characteristic Roman 
triumphs are the triumphs of a material civilisa- 
tion.' ' Rome's r61e in the world was "the ab- 
sorption of outlying genius." Themselves an 
unimaginative race with a language not too tract- 
able to poetry, they made great poetry, and they 
made it of patient set purpose, of hard practice. 
I shall revert to this and maybe amplify reasons 
in another lecture. For the moment I content 
myself with stating the fact that no nation ever 
believed in poetry so deeply as the Romans. 

Perpend this then, and do not too hastily deride 
my plea that you should practise verse-writing. 
I know most of the objections, though I may 



46 On the Art of Writing 

not remember all. Mediocribus esse poetis, etc. — 
that summarizes most of them; yet of an infliction 
of much bad verse from you, if I am prepared to 
endure it, why should any one else complain? I 
say that the youth of a university ought to practise 
verse- writing ; and will try to bring this home to 
you by an argument convincing to me, though I 
have never seen it in print. 

What are the great poetical names of the last 
hundred years or so? Coleridge, Wordsworth, 
Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Brown- 
ing, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne — we 
may stop there. Of these, all but Keats, Browning, 
Rossetti were university men; and of these three 
Keats, who died young, cut off in his prime, was 
the only one not fairly well-to-do. It may seem 
a brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing to 
say : but, as a matter of hard fact, the theory 
that poetical genius bloweth where it listeth, 
and equally in poor and rich, holds little truth. 
As a matter of hard fact, nine out of those 
twelve were university men; which means that 
somehow or other they procured the means to get 
the best education England can give. As a matter 
of hard fact, of the remaining three you know 
that Browning was well-to-do, and I challenge 
you that, if he had not been well-to-do, he would 



The Practice of Writing 47 

no more have attained to writing Saul or The Ring 
and the Book than Ruskin would have attained to 
writing Modern Painters if his father had not dealt 
prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small 
private income; and, moreover, he painted. There 
remains but Keats; whom Atropos slew young, as 
she slew John Clare in a madhouse, and James 
Thomson by the laudanum he took to drug dis- 
appointment. These are dreadful facts, but let 
us face them. It is — however dishonouring to us 
as a nation — certain that, by some fault in our 
commonwealth, the . poor poet has not in these 
days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog's 
chance. Believe me — and I have spent a great 
part of the last ten years in watching some 320 
elementary schools — we may prate of democracy, 
but actually a poor child in England has little 
more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave 
to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom 
of which great writings are born. 

What do I argue from this? I argue that until 
we can bring more intellectual freedom into our 
State, more "joy in widest commonalty spread," 
upon you, a few favoured ones, rests an obligation 
to see that the springs of English poetry do not 
fail. I put it to you that of this glory of our birth 
and state you are the temporary stewards. I put 



48 On the Art of Writing 

it to the University, considered as a dispenser of 
intellectual light, that to treat English poetry as 
though it had died with Tennyson and your lec- 
turers had but to compose the features of a corpse, 
is to abnegate high hope for the sake of a barren 
convenience. I put it to the Colleges, considered 
as disciplinary bodies, that the old way of letting 
Coleridge slip, chasing forth Shelley, is, after all, 
not the wisest way. Recollect that in poesy as 
in every other human business, the more there are 
who practise it the greater will be the chance of 
someone's reaching perfection. It is the impetus 
of the undistinguished host that flings forward a 
Diomed or a Hector. And when you point with 
pride to Milton's and those other mulberry trees 
in your Academe, bethink you "What poets are 
they shading to-day? Or are their leaves but 
feeding worms to* spin gowns to drape Doctors 
of Letters?" 

In the life of Benvenuto Cellini you will find this 
passage worth your pondering. — He is telling how, 
while giving the last touches to his Perseus in the 
great square of Florence, he and his workmen inhab- 
ited a shed built around the statue. He goes on : — 

The folk kept on attaching sonnets to the posts of 
the door. ... I believe that, on the day when I 
opened it for a few hours to the public, more than 



The Practice of Writing 49 

twenty were nailed up, all of them overflowing with 
the highest panegyrics. Afterwards, when I once 
more shut it off from view, everyone brought sonnets 
with Latin and Greek verses: for the University of 
Pisa was then in vacation, and all the doctors and 
scholars kept vying with each other who could 
produce the best. 



I may not live to see the doctors and scholars of 
this University thus employing the long vaca- 
tion; as perhaps we shall wait some time for an- 
other Perseus to excite them to it. But I do 
ask you to consider that the Perseus was not en- 
tirely cause nor the sonnets entirely effect; that 
the age when men are eager about great work is the 
age when great work gets itself done; nor need it 
disturb us that most of the sonnets were, likely 
enough, very bad ones — in Charles Lamb's phrase, 
very like what Petrarch might have written if 
Petrarch had been born a fool. It is the impetus 
that I ask of you : the will to try. 

Lastly, Gentlemen, do not set me down as one 
who girds at your preoccupation, up here, with 
bodily games; for, indeed, I hold " gymnastic' ' 
to be necessary as "music" (using both words in 
the Greek sense) for the training of such youths as 
we desire to send forth from Cambridge. But I 
plead that they should be balanced, as they were 



50 On the Art of Writing 

in the perfect young knight with whose words I 
will conclude to-day: 

Having this day my horse, my hand, my lance 
Guided so well that I obtained the prize, 
Both by the judgment of the English eyes 
And of some sent from that sweet enemy France; 
Horsemen my skill in horsemanship advance, 
Town-folk my strength, a daintier judge applies 
His praise to sleight which from good use doth rise; 
Some lucky wits impute it but to chance; 
Others, because of both sides I do take 
f. My blood from them who did excel in this, 
Think Nature me a man-at-arms did make. 

How far they shot awry! the true cause is, 
Stella looked on ; and from her heavenly face 
Sent forth the beams which made so fair my race. 

"Untrue," you say? Well, there is truth of emo- 
tion as well as of fact ; and who is there among you 
but would fain be able not only to win such a 
guerdon but to lay it in such wise at your lady's 
feet? 

That then was Philip Sidney, called the peer- 
less one of his age; and perhaps no Englishman 
ever lived more graciously or, having used life, 
made a better end. But you have seen this morn- 
ing's newspaper; you have read of Captain Scott 
and his comrades, and in particular of the death 
of Captain Oates; and you know that the breed 



The Practice of Writing 51 

of Sidney is not extinct. Gentlemen, let us keep 
our language noble: for we still have heroes to 
commemorate! 1 

1 The date of the above lecture was Wednesday, February 12, 
1913, the date on which our morning newspapers printed the 
first telegrams giving particulars of the fate of Captain Scott's 
heroic conquest of the South Pole and still more glorious, though 
defeated, return. The first brief message concerning Captain 
Oates, ran as follows: 

"From the records found in the tent where the bodies were 
discovered it appeared that Captain Oates 's feet and hands were 
badly frost-bitten, and, although he struggled on heroically, 
his comrades knew on March 16th that his end was approaching. 
He had borne intense suffering for weeks without complaint, 
and he did not give up hope to the very end. ! 

" ' He was a brave soul. He slept through the night hoping 
not to wake; but he awoke in the morning. 

"'It was blowing a blizzard. Oates said: "I am just going 
'outside and I may be some time." He went out into the bliz- 
zard, and we have not seen him since. 

" 'We knew that Oates was walking to his death, but though 
we tried to dissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man 
and an English gentleman. ' " 



Ill 

On the Difference between Verse and Prose 

You will forgive me, Gentlemen, that having in 
my second lecture encouraged you to the practice 
of verse as well as of prose, I seize the very next 
opportunity to warn you against confusing the 
two, which differ on some points essentially, and 
always so as to demand separate rules — or rather 
(since I am shy of the word " rules") a different 
concept of what the writer should aim at and 
what avoid. But you must, pray, understand 
that what follows will be more useful to the 
tiro in prose than to the tiro in verse; for while 
even a lecturer may help you to avoid writing 
prose in the manner of Milton, only the gods — 
and they hardly — can cure a versifier of being 
prosaic. 

We started upon a promise to do without 
scientific definitions ; and in drawing some distinc- 
tions to-day between verse and prose I shall use 
only a few rough ones; good, as I hope, so far as 

52 



Difference between Verse and Prose 53 

they go; not to be found contrary to your scientific 
ones, if ever, under another teacher you attain 
to them; yet for the moment used only as guides 
to practice, and pretending to be no more. 

Thus I go some way — though by no means all 
the way — towards defining literature when I re- 
mind you that its very name (litterae — letters) 
implies the written rather than the spoken word; 
that, for example, however closely they approxi- 
mate one to the other as we trace them back, and 
even though we trace them back to identical 
beginnings, the- writer — the man of letters — 
does to-day differ from the orator. There was a 
time, as you know, when the poet and the historian 
had no less than the orator, and in the most literal 
sense, to "get a hearing." Nay, he got it with 
more pains: for the orator had his senate-house 
or his law-court provided, whereas Thespis jogged 
to fairs in a cart, and the Muse of History, like 
any street acrobat, had to collect her own crowd. 
Herodotus in search of a public packed his history 
in a portmanteau, carted it to Olympia, found a 
favourable "pitch," as we should say, and wooed 
an audience to him much as on a racecourse nowa- 
days do those philanthropic gentlemen who ply 
a dubious trade with three half-crowns and a gold 
chain. It would cost us an effort to imagine the 



54 On the Art of Writing 

late Bishop Stubbs thus trying his fortune with a 
bag full of select charters at Queen's Club or at 
Kempton Park, and exerting his lungs to retrieve 
a crowd that showed some disposition to edge off 
towards the ring or the rails. 

The historian's conditions have improved; and 
like any other sensible man he has advanced his 
claim with them, and revised his method. He 
writes nowadays with his eye on the printed book. 
He may or may not be a dull fellow: being a dull 
fellow, he may or may not be aware of it; but at 
least he knows that, if you lay him upside down 
on your knee, you can on awaking pick him up, 
resume your absorption, and even turn back some 
pages to discover just where or why your interest 
flagged : whereas a Hellene who deserted Herodotus, 
having a bet on the pentathlon, not only missed 
what he missed but missed it for life. 

The invention of print, of course, has made all, 
or almost all, the difference. 

I do not forget that the printed book — the 
written word — presupposes a speaking voice, and 
must ever have at its back some sense in us of the 
speaking voice. But in writing prose nowadays, 
while always recollecting that prose has its origin 
in speech — even as it behoves us to recollect that 
Homer intoned the Iliad to the harp and Sappho 



Difference between Verse and Prose 55 

plucked her passion from the lyre— we have to 
take things as they are. Except Burns, Heine, 
Beranger (with Moore, if you will), and you will 
find it hard to compile in all the lyrical poetry of 
the last 150 years a list of half a dozen first-class 
or even second-class bards who wrote primarily 
to be sung. It may help you to estimate how far 
lyrical verse has travelled from its origins if you 
will but remind yourselves that a sonnet and a 
sonata were once the same thing, and that a ballad 
meant a song accompanied by dancing — the word 
ballata having been specialised down, on the one 
line to the ballet, in which Mademoiselle Genee or 
the Russian performers will dance for our delight, 
using no words at all; on the other to Sir Patrick 
Spens or Clerk Saunders, "ballads" to which no 
one in his senses would dream of pointing a toe. 

Thus with verse the written (or printed) word 
has pretty thoroughly ousted the speaking voice 
and its auxiliaries — the pipe, the lute, the tabor, 
the chorus with its dance movements and sway- 
ing of the body; and in a quieter way much the 
same thing is happening to prose. In the drama, 
to be sure, we still write (or we should) for the 
actors, reckon upon their intonations, their gestures, 
lay account with the tears in the heroine's eyes 
and her visible beauty; though even in the drama 



56 On the Art of Writing 

to-day you may detect a tendency to substitute dia- 
lectic for action and paragraphs for the crcxoyLu0ia, 
the sharp outcries of passion in its give-and- 
take. Again we still — some of us — deliver ser- 
mons from pulpits and orations in Parliament or 
upon public platforms. Yet I am told that the 
vogue of the sermon is passing ; and (by journalists) 
that the leading article has largely superseded it. 
On that point I can offer you no personal evidence ; 
but of civil oratory I am very sure that the whole 
pitch has been sensibly lowered since the day 
of Chatham, Burke, Sheridan; since the day of 
Brougham and Canning; nay ever since the day 
of Bright, Gladstone, Disraeli. Burke, as everyone 
knows, once brought down a Brummagem dagger 
and cast it on the floor of the House. Lord Chan- 
cellor Brougham in a peroration once knelt to the 
assembled peers, "Here the noble lord inclined his 
knee to the Woolsack" is, if I remember, the stage 
direction in Hansard. Gentlemen, though in the 
course of destiny one or another of you may be 
called upon to speak daggers to the Treasury 
Bench, I feel sure you will use none; while, as for 
Lord Brougham's genuflexions, we may agree that 
to emulate them would cost Lord Haldane an 
effort. These and even far less flagrant or flam- 
boyant tricks of virtuosity have gone quite out of 



Difference between Verse and Prose 57 

fashion. You could hardly revive them to-day 
and keep that propriety to which I exhorted you 
a fortnight ago. They would be out of tune; they 
would grate upon the nerves; they would offend 
against the whole style of modern oratory, which 
steadily tends to lower its key, to use the note of 
quiet business-like exposition, to adopt more and 
more the style of written prose. 

Let me help your sense of this change, by a 
further illustration. Burke, as we know, was 
never shy of declaiming — even of declaiming in a 
torrent — when he stood up to speak; but almost 
as little was he shy of it when he sat down to write. 
If you turn to his Letters on the Regicide Peace — 
no raw compositions, but penned in his latter days 
and closing, or almost closing, upon that tenderest 
of farewells to his country — 

In this good old House, where everything at least 
is well aired, I shall be content to put up my fatigued 
horses and here take a bed for the long night that 
begins to darken upon me — 

if, I say, you turn to these Letters on the Regicide 
Peace and consult the title-page, you will find 
them ostensibly addressed to "a Member of the 
present Parliament"; and the opening paragraphs 
assume that Burke and his correspondent are in 



58 On the Art of Writing 

general agreement. But skim the pages and 
your eyes will be arrested again and again by 
sentences like these: 

The calculation of profit in all such wars is false. 
On balancing the account of such wars, ten thousand 
hogsheads of sugar are purchased at ten thousand 
times their price — the blood of man should never be 
shed but to redeem the blood of man. It is well shed 
for our family, for our friends, for our God, for our 
country, for our kind. The rest is vanity; the rest 
is crime. 

Magnificent truly! But your ear has doubtless 
detected the blank verse — three iambic lines : 

Are purchased at ten thousand times their price . . . 
Be shed but to redeem the blood of man . . . 
The rest is vanity ; the rest is crime. 

Again Burke catches your eye by rhetorical 
inversions: 

But too often different is rational conjecture from 
melancholy fact. 

Well is it known that ambition can creep as well as 
soar, 

by repetitions: 

Never, no never, did Nature say one thing and 
Wisdom say another ... 



Difference between Verse and Prose 59 

Algiers is not near; Algiers is not powerful; Algiers is 
not our neighbour; Algiers is not infectious. Algiers, 
whatever it may be, is an old creation ; and we have 
good data to calculate all the mischief to be appre- 
hended from it. When I find Algiers transferred to 
Calais, I will tell you what I think of that point — 

by quick staccato utterances, such as: 

And is this example nothing? It is everything. 
Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn 
at no other — 

or 

Our dignity? That is gone. I shall say no more 
about it. Light lie the earth on the ashes of English 
pride! 

I say that the eye or ear, caught by such tropes, 
must (if it be critical) recognise them at once as 
rhetoric, as the spoken word masquerading under 
guise of the written. Burke may pretend to be 
seated, penning a letter to a worthy man who will 
read it in his slippers; but actually Burke is up 
and pacing his library at Beaconsfield, now strid- 
ing from fire-place to window with hands clasped 
under his coat tails, anon pausing to fling out an 
arm with some familiar accustomed gesture in a 
House of Commons that knows him no more, 
towards a Front Bench purpled by shades. In 



60 On the Art of Writing 

fine the pretence is Cicero writing to Atticus, but 
the style is Cicero denouncing Catiline. 

As such it is not for your imitation. Burke 
happened to be a genius, with a swoop and range 
of mind, as of language to interpret it, with a 
gift to enchant, a power to strike and astound, 
which together make him, to my thinking, the 
man in our literature most nearly comparable with 
Shakespeare. Others may be more to your taste; 
you may love others better; but no other two 
leave you so hopeless of discovering how it is done. 
Yet not for this reason only would I warn you 
against imitating either. For like all great artists 
they accepted their conditions and wrought for 
them, and those conditions have changed. When 
Jacques wished to recite to an Elizabethan 
audience that 

All the world's a stage, 

And all the men and women merely players — 

or Hamlet to soliloquise 

To be or not to be: that is the question — 

the one did not stretch himself under a property 
oak, nor did the other cast himself back in a chair 
and dangle his legs. They both advanced boldly 
from the stage, down a narrow platform provided 



Difference between Verse and Prose 61 

for such recitations and for that purpose built 
boldly forward into the auditorium, struck an 
attitude, declaimed the purple passage, and re- 
turned, covered with applause, to continue the 
action of the play. This was the theatrical con- 
vention; this the audience expected and under- 
stood; for this Shakespeare wrote. Similarly, 
though the device must have been wearing thin 
even in 1795-6, Burke cast a familiar epistle into 
language proper to be addressed to Mr. Speaker 
of the House of Commons. Shakespeare wrote, 
as Burke wrote, for his audience; and their glory 
is that they have outlasted the conditions they 
observed. Yet it was by observing them that 
they gained the world's ear. Let us, who are less 
than they, beware of scorning to belong to our 
own time. 

For my part I have a great hankering to see 
English literature feeling back through these old 
modes to its origins. I think, for example, that 
if we studied to write verse that could really be 
sung, or if we were more studious to write prose 
that could be read aloud with pleasure to the ear, 
we should be opening the pores to the ancient 
sap; since the roots are always the roots, and 
we can only reinvigorate our growth through 
them. 



62 On the Art of Writing 

Unhappily, however, I cannot preach this just 
yet; for we are aiming at practice, and at Cam- 
bridge (they tell me) while you speak very well, 
you write less expertly. A contributor to The 
Cambridge Review, a fortnight ago, lamented this 
at length; so you will not set the aspersion down 
to me, nor blame me if these early lectures too 
officiously offer a kind of "First Aid"; that, while 
all the time eager to descant on the affinities of 
speech and writing, I dwell first on their differences; 
or that, in speaking of Burke, an author I adore 
only "on this side idolatry," I first present him 
in some aspects for your avoidance. Similarly 
I adore the prose of Sir Thomas Browne, yet 
should no more commend it to you for instant 
imitation than I could encourage you to walk 
with a feather in your cap and a sword under your 
gown. Let us observe proprieties. 

To return to Burke. — At his most flagrant, in 
these Letters on the Regicide Peace, he boldly raids 
Shakespeare. You are all, I doubt not, conversant 
with the Prologue to Henry the Fifth: 



O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend__ 
The brightest heaven of invention! 
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act 
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! 



Difference between Verse and Prose 63 

Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, 

Assume the port of Mars; and at his heells, 

Leash' d in like hounds, should Famine, Sword, and 

Fire 
Crouch for employment. 

Well, this passage Burke, assuming his correspon- 
dent to be familiar with it, boldly claps into prose 
and inserts into a long diatribe against Pitt for 
having tamely submitted to the rebuffs of the 
French Directory. Thus it becomes : 

On that day it was thought he would have assumed 
the port of Mars; that he would bid to be brought 
forth from their hideous Kennel (where his scrupulous 
tenderness had too long immured them) those im- 
patient dogs of War, whose fierce regards affright 
even the minister of vengeance that feeds them; that 
he would let them loose in Famine, Plagues, and 
Death, upon a guilty race to whose frame and to all 
whose habit, Order, Peace, Religion, and Virtue, are 
alien and abhorrent. 

Now Shakespeare is but apologising for the 
shortcomings of his playhouse, whereas Burke is 
denouncing his country's shame and prophesy- 
ing disaster to Europe. Yet do you not feel with 
me that while Shakespeare, using great words on 
the lowlier subject, contrives to make them appro- 
priate, with Burke, writing on the loftier subject, 



64 On the Art of Writing 

the same or similar words have become tumid, 
turgid? 

Why? I am sure that the difference lies not in 
the two men; nor is it all the secret, or even half 
the secret, that Burke is mixing up the spoken 
with the written word, using the one while pre- 
tending to use the other. That has carried us 
some way; but now let us take an important step 
farther. The root of the matter lies in certain 
essential differences between verse and prose. We 
will keep, if you please, to our rough practical 
definitions. Literature — the written word — is a 
permanent record of memorable speech; a record, 
at any rate, intended to be permanent. We set 
a thing down in ink — we print it in a book — be- 
cause we feel it to be memorable, to be worth 
preserving. But to set this memorable speech 
down we must choose one of two forms, verse or 
prose ; and I define verse to be a record in metre 
and rhythm, prose to be a record which, dispensing 
with metre (abhorring it indeed), uses rhythm 
laxly, preferring it to be various and unconstrained, 
so always that it convey a certain pleasure to the 
ear. 

You observe that I avoid the term poetry, over 
which the critics have waged, and still are waging, 
a war that promises to be endless. Is Walt Whit- 



Difference between Verse and Prose 65 

man a poet? Is the Song of Songs (which is not 
Solomon's) — is the Book of Job — are the Psalms 
— all of these as rendered in our Authorized Ver- 
sion of Holy Writ — are all of these poetry? Well 
"yes," if you want my opinion; and again "yes," 
I am sure. But truly on this field, though scores 
of great men have fought across it — Sidney, 
Shelley, Coleridge, Scaliger (I pour the names on 
you at random), Johnson, Wordsworth, the two 
Schlegels, Aristotle with Twining his translator, 
Corneille, Goethe, Warton, Whately, Hazlitt, Em- 
erson, Hegel, Gummere — but our axles grow hot. 
Let us put on the brake; for in practice the dispute 
comes to very little; since literature is an art and 
treats scientific definitions as J. K. Stephen re- 
commended. From them 

It finds out what it cannot do, 
And then it goes and does it. 

I am journeying, say, in the west of England. I 
cross a bridge over a stream dividing Devon from 
Cornwall. These two counties, each beautiful 
in its way, are quite unlike in their beauty; yet 
nothing happened as I stepped across the brook, 
and for a mile or two or even ten I am aware of no 
change. Sooner or later that change will break 
upon the mind and I shall be startled, awaking 



66 On the Art of Writing 

suddenly to a land of altered features. But at 
what turn of the road this will happen, just how 
long the small multiplied impressions will take to 
break into surmise, into conviction — that nobody- 
can tell. So it is with poetry and prose. They 
are different realms, but between them lies a de- 
batable land which a De Quincey or a Whitman 
or a Paul Fort or a Marinetti may attempt. I 
advise you who are beginners to keep well one side 
or other of the frontier, remembering that there 
is plenty of room and what happened to Tupper. 
If we restrict ourselves to the terms "verse" 
and " prose," we shall find the line much easier to 
draw. Verse is memorable speech set down in 
metre with strict rhythms; prose is memorable 
speech set down without constraint of metre and 
in rhythms both lax and various — so lax, so vari- 
ous, that until quite recently no real attempt has 
been made to reduce them to rule. I doubt, for 
my part, if they can ever be reduced to rule; and 
after a perusal of Professor Saintsbury's latest 
work, A History of English Prose Rhythm, I am 
left doubting. I commend this book to you as 
one that clears up large patches of forest. No one 
has yet so well explained what our prose writers, 
generation after generation, have tried to do with 
prose; and he has, by the way, furnished us with 



Difference between Verse and Prose 67 

a capital anthology — or, as he puts it, with "divers 
delectable draughts of example." But the road 
still waits to be driven. Seeking practical guid- 
ance — help for our present purpose — I note first 
that many a passage he scans in one way may 
as readily be scanned in another; that when he 
has finished with one and can say proudly with 
Wordsworth: — 

I've measured it from side to side, 
'Tis three feet long and two feet wide, 

we still have a sensation of coming out (our good 
master with us) by that same door wherein we 
went; and I cannot as yet after arduous trial 
discover much profit in his table of feet — paeons, 
dochmiacs, antispasts, proceleusmatics, and the 
rest— an antispast being but an iamb followed by 
a trochee, and proceleusmatic but two pyrrhics, 
or four consecutive short syllables — when I reflect 
that, your possible number of syllables being as 
many as five to a foot, you may label them (as 
Aristotle would say) until you come to infinity, 
where desire fails, without getting nearer any rule 
of application. 

Let us respect a genuine effort pi learning, 
though we may not detect its immediate profit. 
In particular let us respect whatever Professor 



68 On the Art of Writing 

Saintsbury writes, who has done such splendid 
work upon English verse-prosody. I dare say he 
would retort upon my impatience grandly enough, 
quoting Walt Whitman: — 

I am the teacher of athletes; 

He that by me spreads a wider breast than my own 

proves the width of my own ; 
He most honours my style who learns under it to 

destroy the teacher. 

His speculations may lead to much in time ; though 
for the present they yield us small instruction in 
the path we seek. 

It is time we harked back to our own sign-posts. 
Verse is written in metre and strict rhythm ; prose, 
without metre and with the freest possible rhythm. 
That distinction seems simple enough, but it car- 
ries consequences very far from simple. Let me 
give you an illustration taken almost at hazard 
from Milton, from the Second Book of Paradise 
Regained: — 

Up to a hill anon his steps he reared 
From whose high top to ken the prospect round, 
If cottage were in view, sheep-cote or herd; 
But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw. 

These few lines are verse, are obviously verse 
with the accent of poetry; while as obviously they 



Difference between Verse and Prose 69 

are mere narrative and tell us of the simplest 
possible incident — how Christ climbed a hill to 
learn what could be seen from the top. Yet ob- 
serve, line for line and almost word for word, 
how strangely they differ from prose. Mark the 
inversions: "Up to a hill anon his steps he reared," 
r< But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw." 
Mark next the diction — "his steps he reared." 
In prose we should not rear our steps up the Gog- 
magog hills, or even more Alpine fastnesses; nor, 
arrived at the top, should we "ken" the prospect 
round; we might "con," but should more probably 
"survey" it. Even "anon" is a tricky word in 
prose, though I deliberately palmed it off on you 
a few minutes ago. Mark thirdly the varied 
repetition, "if cottage were in view, sheep-cote 
or herd — but cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none 
he saw." Lastly compare the whole with such 
an account as you or I or Cluvienus would write 
in plain prose: 

Thereupon he climbed a hill on the chance that the 
view from its summit might disclose some sign of 
human habitation — a herd, a sheep-cote, a cottage 
perhaps. But he could see nothing of the sort. 

But you will ask, "Why should verse and prose 
employ diction so different? Why should the one 



70 On the Art of Writing 

invert the order of words in a fashion not permitted 
to the other?" and I shall endeavour to answer 
these questions together with a third, which, I 
dare say, you have sometimes been minded to put 
when you have been told — and truthfully told — 
by your manuals and histories, that when a nation 
of men starts making literature it invariably 
starts on the difficult emprise of verse, and goes on 
to prose as by an afterthought. Why should men 
start upon the more difficult form and proceed to 
the easier? It is not their usual way. In learning 
to skate, for instance, they do not cut figures 
before practising loose and easy propulsion. 

The answer is fairly simple. Literature (once 
more) is a record of memorable speech ; it preserves 
in words a record of such thoughts or of such deeds 
as we deem worth preserving. Now if you will 
imagine yourself a very primitive man, lacking 
paper or parchment; or a slightly less primitive, 
but very poor, man to whom the price of parch- 
ment and ink is prohibitive; you have two ways 
of going to work. You can carve your words 
upon trees or stones (a laborious process) or you 
can commit them to memory and carry them 
about in your head ; which is cheaper and handier. 
For an illustration, you find it useful, anticipating 
the tax-collector, to know how many days there 



Difference between Verse and Prose 7 1 

are in the current month. But further you find 
it a nuisance and a ruinous waste of time to run off 
to the tribal tree or monolith whenever the calcu- 
lation comes up; so you invent a formula, and 
you cast that formula into verse for the simple 
reason that verse, with its tags, alliterations, beat 
of syllables, jingle of rhymes (however your tribe 
has chosen to invent it), has a knack, not possessed 
by prose, of sticking in your head. You do not 
say, "Quick thy tablets, memory! Let me see — 
January has 31 days, February 28 days, March 
31 days, April 30 days." You invent a verse: 

Thirty days hath September, 
April, June, and November . . . 

Nay, it has been whispered to me, Gentlemen, 
that in this University some such process of memo- 
rising in verse has been applied by bold bad irre- 
verently-minded men even to the Evidences of our 
cherished Paley. 

This, you will say, is mere verse, and not yet 
within measurable distance of poetry. But wait ! 
The men who said the more memorable things, or 
sang them — the men who recounted deeds and 
genealogies of heroes, plagues, and famines, assas- 
sinations, escapes from captivity, wanderings and 
conquests of the clan, all the "old, unhappy, far- 



72 On the Art of Writing 

off things and battles long ago" — the men who 
sang these things for their living, for a supper, a 
bed in the great hall, and something in their 
wallet to carry them on to the next lordship — 
these were gleemen, scops, bards, minstrels (call 
them how you will), a professional class who had 
great need of a full repertory in a land swarming 
with petty chieftains, and to adapt their strains 
to the particular hall of entertainment. It would 
never do, for example, to flatter the prowess of 
the Billings in the house of the Hoppings their 
hereditary foes, or to bore the Wokings (who lived 
where the crematorium now is) with the compli- 
cated genealogy of the Tootings; for this would 
have been to miss that appropriateness which I 
preached to you in my second lecture as a pre- 
liminary rule of good writing. Nay, when the 
Billings intermarried with the Tootings — when the 
Billings took to cooing, so to speak — a hasty blend 
of excerpts would be required for the Epitkalamium. 
So it was all a highly difficult business, needing 
adaptability, a quick wit, a goodly stock of songs, 
a retentive memory and every artifice to assist it. 
Take Widsith, for example, the "far- travelled 
man." He begins: 

Widsith spake : he unlocked his word-hoard. 



Difference between Verse and Prose 73 

So he had a hoard of words, you see; and he must 
have needed them, for he goes on: 

Forpon ic maeg singan and secgan spell, 

Maenan fore mengo in meoduhealle, 

Hu me cynegode cystum dohten. 

Ic waes mid Hunum and mid Hrec5-3otum, 

Mid Sweom and mid 3eatum, and mid SuS-Denum. 

Mid Wenlum ic waes and mid Waernum and mid 

Wicingum. 
Mid 3efjmm ic waes and mid Winedum. . . .* 

and so on for a full dozen lines. I say that the 
memory of such men must have needed every 
artifice to help it; and the chief artifice to their 
hand was one which also delighted the ears of their 
listeners. They sang or intoned to the harp. 

There you get it, Gentlemen. I have purposely, 
skimming a wide subject, discarded much ballast ; 
but you may read and scan and read again, and 
always you must come back to this, that the first 
poets sang their words to the harp or to some such 
instrument; and just there lies the secret why 
poetry differs from prose. The moment you 

1 Therefore I can sing and tell a tale, recount in the Mead 
Hall, how men of high race gave rich gifts to me. I was with 
Huns and with Hreth Goths, with the Swedes, and with the Geats, 
and with the South Danes; I was with the Wenlas, and with the 
Waernas, and with the Vikings; I was with the Gefthas and with 
the Winedae . . . 



74 On the Art of Writing 

introduce music you let in emotion with all its 
sway upon speech. From that moment you 
change everything, down to the order of the words 
— the natural order of the words; and (remember 
this) though the harp be superseded, the voice 
never forgets it. You may take up a Barrack 
Room Ballad of Kipling's, and it is there, though 
you affect to despise it for a banjo or concertina: 

Ford — ford — ford of Kabul river . . . 

"Bang, whang, whang goes the drum, tootle- 
te- tootle the fife." From the moment men intro- 
duced music they made verse a thing essentially 
separate from prose, from its natural key of emo- 
tion to its natural ordering of words. Do not for 
one moment imagine that when Milton writes: 

But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw, 

or 

Of man's first disobedience and the fruit 
Of that forbidden tree . . . 

— where you must seek down five lines before you 
come to the verb, and then find it in the imperative 
mood — do not suppose for a moment that he is 
here fantastically shifting words, inverting phrases 
out of their natural order. For, as St. Paul might 



Difference between Verse and Prose 75 

say, there is a natural order of prose and there is 
a natural order of verse. The natural order of 
prose is: 

I was born in the year 1632, in the City of York, 
of a good family, though not of that county; my father 
being a foreigner of Bremen, who settled in Hull. — 
[Defoe,] 

Or 

Further I avow to your Highness that with these 
eyes I have beheld the person of William Wooton, 
B.D., who has written a good sizeable volume against 
a friend of your Governor (from whom, alas! he must 
therefore look for little favour) in a most gentlemanly 
style, adorned with the utmost politeness and civility. 
—[Swift.] 

The natural order of poetry is: 

Thus with the year 
Seasons return, but not to me returns 
Day, or the sweet approach of Ev'n or Morn, 
Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summer's Rose, 
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine. 

Or 

But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw. 

And this basal difference you must have clear in 
your minds before, in dealing with prose or verse, 
you can practise either with profit or read either 
with intelligent delight. 



IV 
On the Capital Difficulty of Verse 

In our last lecture, Gentlemen, we discussed 
the difference between verse, or metrical writing, 
and prose. We traced that difference (as you 
will remember) to Music — to the harp, the lyre, 
the dance, the chorus, all those first necessary 
accompaniments which verse never quite forgets; 
and we concluded that, as Music ever introduces 
emotion, which is indeed her proper and only 
means of persuading, so the natural language of 
verse will be keyed higher than the natural lan- 
guage of prose; will be keyed higher throughout 
and even for its most ordinary purposes — as for 
example, to tell us that So-and-so sailed to Troy 
with so many ships. 

I grant you that our steps to this conclusion 
were lightly and rapidly taken; yet the stepping- 
stones are historically firm. Verse does precede 
prose in literature; verse does start with musical 
accompaniment ; musical accompaniment does in- 

76 



The Capital Difficulty of Verse 77 

troduce emotion; and emotion does introduce an 
order of its own into speech. I grant you that 
we have travelled far from the days when a prose- 
writer, Herodotus, labelled the books of his his- 
tory by the names of the nine Muses. I grant 
you that if you go to the Vatican and there study 
the statues of the Muses (noble, but of no early 
date) you may note that Calliope, Muse of the 
Epic — unlike her sisters Euterpe, Erato, Thalia — 
holds for symbol no instrument of music, but a 
stylus and a tablet. Yet the earlier Calliope, the 
Calliope of Homer, was a Muse of Song. 

Mrjvtv aeiSs, ®s<* — 

"Had I a thousand tongues, a thousand hands." 
— For what purpose does the poet wish for a 
thousand tongues, but to sing? for what purpose 
a thousand hands, but to pluck the wires? not to 
dip a thousand pens in a thousand inkpots. 

I doubt, in fine, if your most learned studies will 
discover much amiss with the frontier we drew 
between verse and prose, cursorily though we ran 
its line. Nor am I daunted on comparing it with 
Coleridge's more philosophical one, which you 
will find in the Biographia Literaria (c. xvm) : 

And first for the origin of metre. This I would 
trace to the balance in the mind effected by that spon- 



78 On the Art of Writing 

taneous effort which strives to hold in check the work- 
ings of passion. It might be easily explained likewise 
in what manner this salutary antagonism is assisted 
by the very state which it counteracts, and how this 
balance of antagonism becomes organized into metre 
(in the usual acceptation of that term) by a superven- 
ing act of the will and judgment consciously and for 
the foreseen purpose of pleasure. 



I will not swear to understanding precisely what 
Coleridge means here, though I believe that I do. 
But at any rate, and on the principle that of two 
hypotheses, each in itself adequate, we should 
choose the simpler, I suggest in all modesty that 
we shall do better with our own than with Cole- 
ridge's, which has the further disadvantage of 
being scarcely amenable to positive evidence. 
We can say with historical warrant that Sappho 
struck the lyre, and argue therefrom, still within 
close range of correction, that her singing responded 
to the instrument ; whereas to assert that Sappho's 
mind "was balanced by a spontaneous effort which 
strove to hold in check the workings of a passion" 
is to say something for which positive evidence 
will be less handily found, whether to contradict 
or to support. 

Yet if you choose to prefer Coleridge's explana- 
tion, no great harm will be done; since Coleridge, 



The Capital Difficulty of Verse 79 

who may be presumed to have understood it, 
promptly goes on to deduce that, 

as the elements of metre owe their existence to a state 
of increased excitement, so the metre itself should be 
accompanied by the natural language of excitement, 

which is precisely where we found ourselves, save 
that where Coleridge uses the word "excitement" 
we used the word "emotion." 

Shall we employ an illustration before proceed- 
ing? — some sentence easily handled, some com- 
monplace of the moralist, some copybook maxim 
I care not what. "Contentment breeds Happi- 
ness" — That is a proposition with which you 
can hardly quarrel; sententious, sedate, obviously 
true; provoking delirious advocacy as little as 
controversial heat; in short a very fair touchstone. 
Now hear how the lyric treats it, in these lines of 
Dekker: 

Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers? 

O sweet content! 
Art thou rich, yet is thy mind perplex'd? 

punishment! 
Dost thou laugh to see how fools are vex'd 
To add to golden numbers golden numbers? 

O sweet content! O sweet, sweet content! 
Work apace, apace, apace, apace; 
Honest labour wears a lovely face; 

Then hey, nonny nonny — hey nonny nonny! 



80 On the Art of Writing 

Canst drink the water of the crystal spring? 

sweet content! 
Swimst' thou in wealth, yet sink'st in thine own tears? 

O punishment! 
Then he that patiently want's burden bears 
No burden bears, but is a king, a king! 

O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content! 
Work apace, apace, apace, apace; 
Honest labour wears a lovely face ; 

Then hey, nonny nonny — hey, nonny nonny! 

There, in lines obviously written for music, you 
have our sedate sentence, "Contentment breeds 
Happiness,' ' converted to mere emotion. Not 
(to use Coleridge's word) the "excitement" of it. 
There are but two plain indicative sentences in 
the two stanzas — (i) "Honest labour wears a 
lovely face" (used as a refrain), and (2) "Then he 
that patiently want's burden bears no burden 
bears, but is a king, a king!" (heightened 
emotionally by inversion and double repetition). 
Mark throughout how broken is the utterance; 
antithetical question answered by exclamations; 
both doubled and made more antithetical in the 
second stanza; with cunning reduplicated inver- 
sions to follow, and each stanza wound up by 
an outburst of emotional nonsense — "hey, nonny 
nonny — hey, nonny nonny!" — as a man might 
skip or whistle to himself for want of thought. 



The Capital Difficulty of Verse 81 

Now (still keeping to our same subject of Con- 
tentment) let us prosify the lyrical order of lan- 
guage down to the lowest pitch to which genius 
has been able to reduce it and still make noble 
verse. You have all read Wordsworth's famous 
Introduction to the Lyrical Ballads, and you know 
that Wordsworth's was a genius working on a 
theory that the languages of verse and of prose 
are identical. You know, too, I dare say, into 
what banalities that theory over and over again 
betrayed him: banalities such as — 

His widowed mother, for a second mate 
Espoused the teacher of the village school: 
Who on her offspring zealously bestowed 
^Needful instruction, 

— and the rest. Nevertheless Wordsworth was 
a genius; and genius working persistently on a 
narrow theory will now and again "bring it off" 
(as they say). So he, amid the flat waste of his 
later compositions, did undoubtedly "bring it 
off" in the following sonnet: — 

These times strike monied worldlings with dismay: 
Ev'n rich men, brave by nature, taint the air 
With words of apprehension and despair; 

While tens of thousands, thinking on the affray, 

6 



82 On the Art of Writing 

Men unto whom sufficient for the day 
And minds not stinted or untili'd are given, 
Sound healthy children of the God of Heaven, 

Are cheerful as the rising sun in May. 

What do we gather hence but firmer faith 
That every gift of noble origin 

Is breath'd upon by Hope's perpetual breath; 
That Virtue and the faculties within 
Are vital; and that riches are akin 

To fear, to change, to cowardice, and death? 

Here, I grant, are no repetitions, no inversions. 
The sentences, though metrical, run straightfor- 
wardly, verb following subject, object verb, as in 
strict prose. In short here you have verse reduced 
to the order and structure of prose as nearly as a 
man of genius, working on a set theory, could 
reduce it while yet maintaining its proper emo- 
tional key. But first let me say that you will find 
very few like instances of success even in Words- 
worth; and few indeed to set against innumerable 
passages wherein either his verse defies his theory 
and triumphs, or succumbs to it and, succumbing 
either drops sheer to bathos or spreads itself over 
dead flats of commonplace. Let me tell you next 
that the instances you will find in other poets are 
so few and so far between as to be negligible ; and 
lastly that even such verse as the above has only 
to be compared with a passage of prose and its 



The Capital Difficulty of Verse* 83 

emotional pitch is at once betrayed. Take this, 
for example, from Jeremy Taylor: 

Since all the evil in the world consists in the dis- 
agreeing between the object and the appetite, as 
when a man hath what he desires not, or desires what 
he hath not, or desires amiss, he that compares his 
spirit to the present accident hath variety of instance 
for his virtue, but none to trouble him, because his 
desires enlarge not beyond his present fortune; and a 
wise man is placed in a variety of chances, like the 
nave or centre of a wheel in the midst of all the cir- 
cumvolutions and changes of posture, without violence 
or change, save that it turns gently in compliance 
with its changed parts, and is indifferent which part 
is up, and which is down; for there is some virtue 
or other to be exercised whatever happens — either 
patience or thanksgiving, love or fear, moderation 
or humility, charity or contentedness. 

Or, take this from Samuel Johnson: 

The fountain of contentment must spring up in 
the mind; and he who has so little knowledge of 
human nature as to seek happiness by changing any- 
thing but his own disposition, will waste his life in 
fruitless efforts and multiply the griefs which he 
purposes to remove. 

Now, to be frank, I do not call that first passage 
very good prose. Like much of Jeremy Taylor's 
writing it is prose tricked out with the trappings 
and odds-and-ends of verse. It starts off, for 



84 On the Art of Writing 

example, with a brace of heroics — "Since all the 
evil in the world consists" . . . "between the 
object and the appetite." You may say, further, 
that the simile of the wheel, though proper enough 
to prose, is poetical too; that Homer might have 
used it ("As in a wheel the rim turns violently, 
while the nave, though it turns also, yet seems to 
be at rest" — something of that sort). Never- 
theless you will agree with me that, in exchanging 
Wordsworth for Taylor and Johnson, we have 
relaxed something with the metre, something 
that the metre kept taut; and this something we 
discover to be the emotional pitch. 

But let me give you another illustration, sup- 
plied (I dare say quite unconsciously) by one who 
combined a genuine love of verse — in which, how- 
ever, he was no adept — with a sure instinct for 
beautiful prose. Contentment was a favourite 
theme with Isaak Walton; The Compleat Angler 
is packed with praise of it; and in The Compleat 
Angler occurs this well-known passage: — 

But, master, first let me tell you, that very hour 
which you were absent from me, I sat down under a 
willow tree by the waterside, and considered what you 
had told me of the owner of that pleasant meadow in 
which you then left me ; that he had a plentiful estate 
and not a heart to think so; that he had at this time 



The Capital Difficulty of Verse 83 

many lawsuits depending, and that they both damped 
his mirth and took up so much of his time and thoughts 
that he had no leisure to take the sweet content that 
I, who pretended no title to them, took in his fields; 
for I could there sit quietly; and looking on the water, 
see some fishes sport themselves in the silver streams, 
others leaping at flies of several shapes and colours; 
looking on the hills, I could behold them spotted with 
woods and groves; looking down the meadows, could 
see, here a boy gathering lilies and lady-smocks, and 
there a girl cropping culverlocks and cowslips, all to 
make garlands suitable to this present month of May. 
These and many other field-flowers so perfumed the 
air that I thought that very meadow like that field 
in Sicily of which Diodorus speaks, where the per- 
fumes arising from the place make all dogs that hunt 
in it to fall off and lose their hottest scent. I say, 
as I thus sat, joying in my own happy condition, and 
pitying this poor rich man that owned this and many 
other pleasant groves and meadows about me, I did 
thankfully remember what my Saviour said, that the 
meek possess the earth; or rather they enjoy what the 
others possess and enjoy not; for Anglers and meek 
quiet-spirited men are free from those high, those 
restless thoughts which corrode the sweets of life; 
and they, and they only can say as the poet has 
happily exprest it : 

"Hail, blest estate of lowliness! 

Happy enjoyments of such minds 
As, rich in self-contentedness, 

Can, like the reeds in roughest winds, 
By yielding make that blow but small 
At which proud oaks and cedars fall." , 



86 On the Art of Writing 

There you have a passage of felicitous prose cul- 
minating in a stanza of trite and fifth-rate verse. 
Yes, Walton's instinct is sound; for he is keying 
up the pitch; and verse, even when mediocre in 
quality, has its pitch naturally set above that of 
prose. So, if you will turn to your Walton and 
read the page following this passage, you will see 
that, still by a sure instinct, he proceeds from 
this scrap of reflective verse to a mere rollicking 
"catch": 

Man's life is but vain, for 'tis subject to pain 

And sorrow, and short as a bubble; 
'Tis a hodge-podge of business and money and care, 

And care and money and trouble . . . 

— which is even worse rubbish, and yet a step 
upwards in emotion because Venator actually sings 
it to music. "Ay marry, sir, this is music indeed, " 
approves Brother Peter; "this cheers the heart." 

In this and the preceding lecture, Gentlemen, 
I have enforced at some length the opinion that 
to understand the many essential differences 
between verse and prose we must constantly bear 
in mind that verse, being metrical, keeps the 
character originally imposed on it by musical 
accompaniment and must always, however far 



The Capital Difficulty of Verse 87 

the remove, be referred back to its origin and to 
the emotion which music excites. 

Mr. George Bernard Shaw, having to commit his 
novel Cashel Byron 1 s Profession to paper in a hurry, 
chose to cast it in blank verse as being more easily 
and readily written so: a performance which 
brilliantly illuminates a half-truth. Verse — or 
at any rate, unrhymed iambic verse— is easier to 
write than prose, if you care to leave out the emo- 
tion which makes verse characteristic and worth 
writing. I have little doubt that, had he chosen 
to attempt it, Mr. Shaw would have found his 
story still more ductile in the metre of Hiawa- 
tha. But the experiment proves nothing; or no 
more than that, all fine art costing labour, it 
may cost less if burlesqued in a category not its 
own. 

Let me take an example from a work with 
which you are all familiar — The Student's Hand- 
book to the University and Colleges of Cambridge. 
On p. 405 we read : — 

The Medieval and Modern Languages Tripos is 
divided into ten sections, A, A2, B, G, D, E, F, G, H, 
and I. A student may take either one or two sections 
at the end of his second year of residence, and either 
one or two more sections at the end of his third or 
fourth year of residence ; or he may take two sections 
at the end of his third year only. Thus this Tripos 



88 On the Art of Writing 

can be treated either as a divided or an undivided 
Tripos at the option of the candidate. 

Now I do not hold that up to you for a model 
of prose. Still, lucidity rather than emotion being 
its aim, I doubt not that the composer spent pains 
on it; more pains than it would have cost him to 
convey his information metrically, thus : — 

There is a Tripos that aspires to blend 

The Medieval and the Modern tongues 

In one red burial (Sing Heavenly Muse !) 

Divided into sections A, A2, 

B, C, D, E, F, G and H and I. 

A student may take either one or two 

(With some restrictions mention'd in a footnote) 

At th' expiration of his second year: 

Or of his third, or of his fourth again 

Take one or two ; or of his third alone 

Take two together. Thus this tripos is 

(Like nothing in the Athanasian Creed) 

Divisible or indivisible 

At the option of the candidate — Gadzooks ! 

This method has even some advantage over the 
method of prose in that it is more easily memorised ; 
but it has, as you will admit, the one fatal flaw 
that it imports emotion into a theme which does 
not properly admit of emotion, and that so it 
offends against our first rule of writing — that it 
should be appropriate. 



The Capital Difficulty of Verse 89 

Now if you accept the argument so far as we 
have led it — that verse is by nature more emo- 
tional than prose — certain consequences would 
seem to follow : of which the first is that while the 
capital difficulty of verse consists in saying ordi- 
nary things the capital difficulty of prose consists 
in saying extraordinary things; that while with 
verse, keyed for high moments, the trouble is to 
manage the intervals, with prose the trouble is 
to manage the high moments. 

Let us dwell awhile on this difference, for it is 
important. You remember my quoting to you in 
my last lecture these lines of Milton's : — 

Up to a hill anon his steps he reared 
From whose high top to ken the prospect round, 
If cottage were in view, sheep-cote or herd; 
But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw. 

We agreed that these were good lines, with the 
accent of poetry ; but we allowed it to be a- highly 
exalted way of telling how So-and-so climbed a 
hill for a better view but found none. Now ob- 
viously this exaltation does not arise immediately 
out of the action described (which is as ordinary 
as it well could be), but is derivative. It borrows 
its wings, its impetus, from a previous high 
moment, from the emotion proper to that moment, 



90 On the Art of Writing 

from the speech proper to that emotion ; and these 
sustain us across to the next height as with the 
glide of an aeroplane. Your own sense will tell 
you at once that the passage would be merely 
bombastic if the poet were starting to set forth 
how So-and-so climbed a hill for the view — just 
that, and nothing else; as your own sense tells you 
that the swoop is from one height to another. 
For if bathos lay ahead, if Milton had but to re- 
late how the Duke of York, with twenty thousand 
men, "marched up a hill and then marched down 
again," he certainly would not use diction such as: 

Up to a hill anon his steps he reared. 

Even as it is, I think we must all detect a certain 
artificiality in the passage, and confess to some 
relief when Satan is introduced to us, ten lines 
lower down, to revivify the story. For let us note 
that, in the nature of things, the more adorned and 
involved our style (and Milton's is both ornate 
and involved) the more difficulty we must find 
with these flat pedestrian intervals. Milton may 
"bring it off," largely through knowing how to 
dodge the interval and contrive that it shall at 
any rate be brief; but, as Bagehot noted, when we 
come to Tennyson and find Tennyson in Enoch 
Arden informing us of a fish-jowter, that: — 



The Capital Difficulty of Verse 91 

Enoch's white horse, and Enoch's ocean-spoil 
In ocean-smelling osier — 

(i. e., in a fish-basket) 

— and his face, 
Rough-reddened with a thousand winter gales, 
Not only to the market town were known, 
But in the leafy lanes beyond the down 
Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp 
And peacock-yewtree of the lonely Hall, 
Whose Friday fare was Enoch's ministering, 

why, then we feel that the vehicle is altogether 
too pompous for its load, and those who make 
speech too pompous for its content commit, albeit 
in varying degrees, the error of Defoe's religious 
lady who, seeing a bottle of over-ripe beer explode 
and cork and froth fly up to the ceiling, cried out, 
"O, the wonders of Omnipotent Power !" The 
poet who commends fresh fish to us as "ocean- 
spoil" can cast no stone at his brother who writes 
of them as "the finny denizens of the deep," or 
even at his cousin the journalist, who exalts the 
oyster into a "succulent bivalve" — 

The feathered tribes on pinions cleave the air; 
Not so the mackerel, and, still less, the bear! 

I believe this difficulty, which verse, by nature 
and origin emotional, encounters in dealing with 



92 On the Art of Writing 

ordinary unemotional narrative, to lie as a techni- 
cal reason at the bottom of Horace's advice to 
the writer of Epic to plunge in medias res, thus 
avoiding flat preparative and catching at once a 
high wind which shall carry him hereafter across 
dull levels and intervals. I believe that it lay — 
though whether consciously or not he scarcely 
tells us — at the bottom of Matthew Arnold's 
mind when, selecting certain qualities for which 
to praise Homer, he chose, for the very first, 
Homer's rapidity. "First," he says, "Homer is 
eminently rapid; and," he adds justly, "to this 
rapidity the elaborate movement of Miltonic 
blank verse is alien." 

Now until one studies writing as an art, trying 
to discover what this or that form of it accomplishes 
with ease and what with difficulty, and why verse 
can do one thing and prose another, Arnold's 
choice of rapidity to put in the forefront of Homer's 
merits may seem merely capricious. "Homer (we 
say) has other great qualities. Arnold himself 
indicates Homer's simplicity, directness, nobility. 
Surely either one of these should be mentioned 
before rapidity, in itself not comparable as a virtue 
with either?" 

But when we see that the difficulty of verse- 
narrative lies just here; that the epic poet who is 



The Capital Difficulty of Verse 93 

rapid has met, and has overcome, the capital diffi- 
culty of his form, then we begin to do justice not 
only to Arnold as a critic but (which is of far higher 
moment) to Homer as a craftsman. 

The genius of Homer in this matter is in fact 
something daemonic. He seems to -shirk nothing; 
and the effect of this upon critics is bewildering. 
The acutest of them are left wondering how on 
earth an ordinary tale — say of how some mariners 
beached ship, stowed sail, walked ashore, and 
cooked their dinner — can be made so poetical. 
They are inclined to divide the credit between the 
poet and his fortunate age — "a time" suggests 
Pater "in which one could hardly have spoken at 
all without ideal effect, or the sailors pulled down 
their boat without making a picture ' in the great 
style' against a sky charged with marvels." 

Well, the object of these lectures is not to explain 
genius". Just here it is rather to state a difficulty; 
to admit that, once in history, genius overcame it; 
yet warn you how rare in the tale of poetical 
achievement is such a success. Homer, indeed, 
stands first, if not unmatched, among poets in 
this technical triumph over the capital disability 
of annihilating flat passages. I omit Shakespeare 
and the dramatists; because they have only to 
give a stage direction "Enter Cassius, looking 



94 On the Art of Writing 

lean" and Cassius comes in looking leaner than 
nature; whereas Homer has in his narrative to 
walk Hector or Thersites on to the scene, describe 
him, walk him off. I grant the rapidity of Dante. 
It is amazing ; and we may yield him all the credit 
for choosing (it was his genius that chose it) a 
subject which allowed of the very highest rapidity ; 
since Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, though they 
differ in other respects, have this in common, 
that they are populous and the inhabitants of 
each so compendiously shepherded together that 
the visitor can turn from one person to another 
without loss of time. But Homer does not escort 
us around a menagerie in which we can move ex- 
peditiously from one cage to another. He pro- 
poses at least, both in the Iliad and in the Odyssey, 
to unfold a story; and he seems to unfold it so 
artlessly that we linger on the most pedestrian 
intervals while he tells us, for example, what the 
heroes ate and how they cooked it. A modern 
writer would serve us a far better dinner. Homer 
brings us to his with our appetite all the keener 
for having waited and watched the spitting and 
roasting. 

I would point out to you what art this genius 
conceals; how cunning is this apparent simplicity; 
and for this purpose let me take Homer at the 



The Capital Difficulty of Verse 95 

extreme of his difficulty — when he has to describe 
a long sea-voyage. 

Some years ago, in his last Oxford lectures, Mr. 
Froude lamented that no poet in this country had 
arisen to write a national epic of the great Eliza- 
bethan seamen, to culminate (I suppose) as his 
History culminated, in the defeat of the Armada; 
and one of our younger poets, Mr. Alfred Noyes, 
acting on this hint, has since given us an epic poem 
on Drake in twelve books. But Froude probably 
overlooked, as Mr. Noyes has not overcome, this 
difficulty of the flat interval which, while ever 
the bugbear of Epic, is magnified tenfold when our 
action takes place on the sea. For whereas the 
verse should be rapid and the high moments 
frequent, the business of seafaring is undeniably 
monotonous, as the intervals between port and 
port, sea-fight and sea-fight, must be long and lazy. 
Matters move more briskly in an occasional gale; 
but even a gale lasts, and must be ridden out; 
and the process of riding to a gale of wind : — 

For ever climbing up the climbing wave 

— your ship taking one wave much as she takes 
another — is in its nature monotonous. Nay, you 
have only to read Falconer's Shipwreck to discover 
how much of dulness may lie enwrapped, to dis- 



96 On the Art of Writing 

charge itself, even in a first-class tempest. Courses, 
reckonings, trimmings of canvas — these occur in 
real life and amuse the simple mariner at the time. 
But to the reader, if he be a landsman, their repeti- 
tion in narrative may easily become intolerable; 
and when we get down to the "trades," even the 
seaman sets his sail for a long spell of weather and 
goes to sleep. In short you cannot upon the wide 
Atlantic push action and reaction to and fro as 
upon the plains of windy Troy ; nor could any but 
a superhuman genius make sustained poetry (say) 
out of Nelson's untiring pursuit of Villeneuve, 
which none the less was one of the most heroic 
feats in history. 

This difficulty, inherent in navigation as a sub- 
ject for the Epic Muse, has, I think, been very 
shrewdly detected and hit off in a parody of Mr. 
Noyes's poem by a young friend of mine, Mr. 
Wilfred Blair:— 

Meanwhile the wind had changed, and Francis Drake 
Put down the helm and drove against the seas — 
Once more the wind changed, and the simple seaman, 
Full fraught with weather wisdom, once again 
Put down the helm and so drove on — et cetera. 

Now Homer actually has performed this feat which 
we declare to be next to impossible. He actually 
does convey Odysseus from Troy to Ithaca, by a 



The Capital Difficulty of Verse 97 

ten years' voyage too; he actually has narrated 
that voyage to us in plain straightforward words; 
and, what is more, he actually has made a superb 
epic of it. Yes, but when you come to dissect the 
Odyssey, what amazing artifice is found under 
that apparently straightforward tale! — eight years 
of the ten sliced out, to start with, and magnifi- 
cently presented to Circe 

Where that ^Eaean isle forgets the main 

— and (one may add), so forgetting, avoids the 
technical difficulties connected therewith. 

Note the space given to Telemachus and his 
active search for the lost hero; note too how the 
mass of Odysseus' seafaring adventures is con- 
densed into a reported speech — a traveller's tale 
at the court of Alcinous. Virgil borrowed this 
trick, you remember; and I dare to swear that had 
it fallen to Homer to attempt the impossible saga 
of Nelson's pursuit after Villeneuve he would have 
achieved it triumphantly — by means of a tale told 
in the first person by a survivor to Lady Hamilton. 
Note, again, how boldly (being free to deal with 
an itinerary of which his audience knew nothing 
but surmised that it comprehended a vast deal 
of the marvellous, spaced at irregular distances) 
Homer works in a shipwreck or a miracle 



98 On the Art of Writing 

wherever the action threatens to flag. Lessing, as 
you know, devoted several pages of the Laokoon 
to the shield of Achilles; to Homer's craft in 
depicting it as it grew under Hephaestus' hammer; 
so that we are intrigued by the process of manu- 
facture instead of being wearied by a description 
of the ready-made article ; so also (if one may pre- 
sume to add anything to Lessing) that we are 
cunningly flattered in a sense that the shield is 
being made for us. Well, that is one artifice out 
of many; but if you would gauge at all Homer's 
resource and subtlety in technique I recommend 
you to analyse the first twelve books of the Odyssey 
and count for yourselves the devices by which 
the poet — TcoXuxpoxoq as was never his hero- 
evades or hurries over each flat interval as he 
happens upon it. 

These things, Ulysses, 
The wise bards also 
Behold and sing. 
But 0, what labour! 
O Prince, what pain ! 

You may be thinking, Gentlemen, that I take up 
a disproportionate amount of your time on such 
technical matters as these. But literature being 
an art (forgive the reiteration!) and therefore to 
be practised, I want us to be seeking all the time 



The Capital Difficulty of Verse 99 

how it is done: to hunt out the principles on which 
the great artists wrought; to face, to rationalise, 
the difficulties by which they were confronted, 
and learn how they overcame the particular 
obstacle. Surely even for mere criticism, apart 
from practice, we shall equip ourselves better by 
seeking, so far as we may, how the thing is done 
than by standing at gaze before this or that master- 
piece and murmuring, " Isn't that beautiful! How 
in the world now . . . !" 

I am told that these lectures are criticised as 
tending to make you conceited; to encourage in 
you a belief that you can do things, when it were 
better that you merely admired. Well, I would 
not dishearten you by telling to what a shred of 
conceit, even of hope, a man can be reduced after 
twenty-odd years of the discipline. But I can, 
and do, affirm that the farther you penetrate in 
these discoveries the more sacred the ultimate 
mystery will become for you; that the better you 
understand the great authors as exemplars of 
practice, the more certainly you will realise what 
is the condescension of the gods. 

Next time, then, we will attempt an enquiry 
into the capital difficulty of Prose. 



Interlude: On Jargon 

We parted, Gentlemen, upon a promise to dis- 
cuss the capital difficulty of Prose, as we have 
discussed the capital difficulty of Verse. But, 
although we shall come to it, on second thoughts 
I ask leave to break the order of my argument 
and to interpose some words upon a kind of writ- 
ing which, from a superficial likeness, commonly 
passes for prose in these days, and by lazy folk is 
commonly written for prose, yet actually is not 
prose at all; my excuse being the simple practi- 
cal one that, by first clearing this sham prose out 
of the way, we shall the better deal with honest 
prose when we come to it. The proper difficulties 
of prose will remain; but we shall be agreed in 
understanding what it is, or at any rate what it 
is not, that we talk about. I remember to have 
heard somewhere of a religious body in the United 
States of America which had reason to suspect 
one of its churches of accepting spiritual consola- 

IOO 



Interlude: On Jargon 101 

tion from a coloured preacher — an offence against 
the laws of the Synod — and despatched a Discip- 
linary Committee with power to act; and of the 
Committee's returning to report itself unable to 
take any action under its terms of reference, for 
that while a person undoubtedly coloured had 
undoubtedly occupied the pulpit and had audibly 
spoken from it in the Committee's presence, the 
performance could be brought within no definition 
of preaching known or discoverable. So it is 
with that infirmity of speech — that flux, that 
determination of words to the mouth, or to the 
pen, — which, though it be familiar to you in 
parliamentary debates, in newspapers, and as the 
staple language of Blue Books, Committees, 
OfHcial Report I take leave to introduce to you 
as prose which is not prose and under its real 
name of Jargon. 

You must not confuse this Jargon with what is 
called Journalese. The two overlap, indeed, and 
have a knack of assimilating each other's vices. 
But Jargon finds, maybe, the most of its votaries 
among good douce people who have never written 
to or for a newspaper in their life, who would 
never talk of "adverse climatic conditions" when 
they mean "bad weather"; who have never trifled 
with verbs such as "obsess," "recrudesce," "en- 



102 On the Art of Writing 

visage," " adumbrate/ ' or with phrases such as 
"the psychological moment," "the true inward- 
ness/' "it gives furiously to think." It dallies 
with Latinity — "sub silentio," "de die in diem," 
"cui bono?" (always in the sense, unsuspected 
by Cicero, of "What is the profit?") — but not 
for the sake of style. Your journalist at the worst 
is an artist in his way; he daubs paint of this kind 
upon the lily with a professional zeal; the more 
flagrant (or, to use his own word, arresting) the 
pigment, the happier is his soul. Like the Babu 
he is trying all the while to embellish our poor 
language, to make it more floriferous, more poeti- 
cal — like the Babu for example who, reporting his 
mother's death, wrote, "Regret to inform you, 
the hand that rocked the cradle has kicked the 
bucket." 

There is metaphor; there is ornament; there is a 
sense of poetry, though as yet groping in a world 
unrealised. No such gusto marks — no such zeal, 
artistic or professional, animates — the practition- 
ers of Jargon, who are, most of them (I repeat), 
douce respectable persons. Caution is its father; 
the instinct to save everything and especially 
trouble; its mother, Indolence. It looks precise, 
but is not. It is, in these times, safe: a thousand 
men have said it before and not one to your know- 



Interlude: On Jargon 103 

ledge had been prosecuted for it. And so, like 
respectability in Chicago, Jargon stalks unchecked 
in our midst. It is becoming the language of 
Parliament; it has become the medium through 
which Boards of Government, County Councils, 
Syndicates, Committees, Commercial Firms, ex- 
press the processes as well as the conclusions of 
their thought and so voice the reason of their 
being. 

Has a Minister to say "No" in the House of 
Commons? Some men are constitutionally in- 
capable of saying no; but the Minister conveys it 
thus: "The answer to the question is in the nega- 
tive." That means "no." Can you discover it 
to mean anything less, or anything more except 
that the speaker is a pompous person? — which 
was no part of the information demanded. 

That is Jargon, and it happens to be accurate. 
But as a rule Jargon is by no means accurate, its 
method being to walk circumspectly around its 
target; and its faith, that having done so it has 
either hit the buirs-eye or at least achieved some- 
thing equivalent, and safer. 

Thus the clerk of a Board of Guardians will 
minute that — 

In the case of John Jenkins deceased the coffin 
provided was of the usual character. 



104 On the Art of Writing 

Now this is not accurate. "In the case of John 
Jenkins deceased," for whom a coffin was sup- 
plied, it is wholly superfluous to tell us that he is 
deceased. But actually John Jenkins never had 
more than one case, and that was the coffin. The 
clerk says he had two, — a coffin in a case; but I 
suspect the clerk to be mistaken, and I am sure 
he errs in telling us that the coffin was of the usual 
character; for coffins have no character, usual or 
unusual. 

For another example (I shall not tell you whence 
derived) — 

In the case of every candidate who is placed in the 
first class [So you see the lucky fellow gets a case as 
well as a first-class. He might be a stuffed animal: 
perhaps he is] — In the case of every candidate who is 
placed in the first class the class-list will show by 
some convenient mark (i) the Section or Sections 
for proficiency in which he is placed in the first class 
and (2) the Section or Sections (if any) in which he 
has passed with special distinction. 

"The Section or Sections (if any)" — But how, if 
they are not any, could they be indicated by 
a mark however convenient? 

The Examiners will have regard to the style and 
method of the candidate's answers, and will give credit 
for excellence in these respects. 



Interlude: On Jargon 105 

Have you begun to detect the two main vices of 
Jargon? The first is that it uses circumlocution 
rather than short straight speech. It says: "In 
the case of John Jenkins deceased, the coffin" 
when it means "John Jenkins's coffin"; and its 
yea is not yea, neither is its nay nay ; but its answer 
is in the affirmative or in the negative, as the 
foolish and superfluous "case" may be. The 
second vice is that it habitually chooses vague 
woolly abstract nouns rather than concrete ones. 
I shall have something to say by-and-by about 
the concrete noun, and how you should ever be 
struggling for it whether in prose or in verse. For 
the moment I content myself with advising you, 
if you would write masculine English, never to 
forget the old tag of your Latin Grammar — 

Masculine will only be 

Things that you can touch and see. 

But since these lectures, are meant to be a course 
in First Aid to writing, I will content myself with 
one or two extremely rough rules; yet I shall be 
disappointed if you do not find them serviceable. 
The first is: Whenever in your reading you 
come across one of these words, case, instance, 
character, nature, condition, persuasion, degree — 
whenever in writing your pen betrays you to one 



106 On the Art of Writing 

or another of them — pull yourself up and take 
thought. If it be "case" (I choose it as Jargon's 
dearest child — "in Heaven yclept Metonomy") 
turn to the dictionary, if you will, and seek out 
what meaning can be derived from casus, its 
Latin ancestor; then try how, with a little trouble, 
you can extricate yourself from that case. The 
odds are, you will feel like a butterfly who has 
discarded his chrysalis. 

Here are some specimens to try your hand on: 

(i) All those tears which inundated Lord Hugh 
Cecil's head were dry in the case of Mr. Harold Cox. 

Poor Mr. Cox! left gasping in his aquarium! 

(2) IFrom a cigar-merchant.] In any case, let us 
send you a case on approval. 

(3) It is contended that Consols have fallen in 
consequence: but such is by no means the case. 

"Such" by the way, is another spoilt child of 
Jargon, especially in Committee's Rules — "Co- 
opted members may be eligible as such; such mem- 
bers to continue to serve for such time as" — and 
so on. 

(4) Even in the purely Celtic areas only in two 
or three cases do the Bishops bear Celtic names. 

For "cases" read "dioceses." 



Interlude: On Jargon 107 

Instance. In most instances the players were below 
their form. 

But what were they playing at? Instances? 

Character — Nature. There can be no doubt that 
the accident was caused through the dangerous nature 
of the spot, the hidden character of the by-road, and 
the utter absence of any warning or danger signal. 

Mark the foggy wording of it all! And yet the 
man hit something and broke his neck ! Contrast 
that explanation with the verdict of a coroner's 
jury in the west of England on a drowned post- 
man: "We find that deceased met his death by 
an act of God, caused by sudden overflowing of 
the river Walkham and helped out by the scan- 
dalous neglect of the way-wardens." 

The Aintree course is notoriously of a trying nature. 

On account of its light character, purity, and age, 
Usher's whiskey is a whiskey that will agree with you. 

Order. The mesalliance was of a pronounced order. 

Condition. He was conveyed to his place of 
residence in an intoxicated condition. 

"He was carried home drunk." 

Quality and Section. Mr. , exhibiting no less 

than five works, all of a superior quality, figures 
prominently in the oil section. 

— This was written of an exhibition of pictures. 



108 On the Art of Writing 

Degree. A singular degree of rarity prevails in 
the earlier editions of this romance. 



That is Jargon. In prose it runs simply "The 
earlier editions of this romance are rare" — or "are 
very rare" — or even (if you believe what I take 
leave to doubt), "are singularly rare"; which 
should mean that they are rarer than the editions 
of any other work in the world. 

Now what I ask you to consider about these 
quotations is that in each the writer was using 
Jargon to shirk prose, palming off periphrases 
upon us when with a little trouble he could have 
gone straight to the point. "A singular degree of 
rarity prevails," "the accident was caused through 
the dangerous nature of the spot," "but such is 
by no means the case." We may not be capable 
of much; but we can all write better than that, if 
we take a little trouble. In place of, "the Aintree 
course is of a trying nature" we can surely say 
"Aintree is a trying course" or "the Aintree 
course is a trying one"' — just that and nothing 
more. 

Next, having trained yourself to keep a look- 
out for these worst offenders (and you will be sur- 
prised to find how quickly you get into the way of 
it), proceed to push your suspicions out among the 



Interlude: On Jargon 109 

whole cloudy host of abstract terms. "How ex- 
cellent a thing is sleep," sighed Sancho Panza; "it 
wraps a man round like a cloak" — an excellent 
example, by the way, of how to say a thing con- 
cretely; a Jargoneer would have said that "among 
the beneficent qualities of sleep its capacity for 
withdrawing the human consciousness from the 
contemplation of immediate circumstances may 
perhaps be accounted not the least remarkable." 
How vile a thing — shall we say? — is the abstract 
noun! It wraps a man's thoughts round like 
cotton wool. 

Here is a pretty little nest of specimens, found 
in The Times newspaper by Messrs. H. W. and 
F. G. Fowler, authors of that capital little book 
The King's English: 

One of the most important reforms mentioned in 
the rescript is the unification of the organization of 
judicial institutions and the guarantee for all the 
tribunals of the independence necessary for securing 
to all classes of the community equality before the law. 

I do not dwell on the cacophony; but, to convey a 
straightforward piece of news, might not the edi- 
tor of The Times as well employ a man to write : 

One of the most important reforms is that of the 
Courts, which need a uniform system and to be 



no On the Art of Writing 

made independent. In this way only can men be 
assured that all are equal before the law. 

I think he might. 

A day or two ago the musical critic of the 
Standard wrote this: 

MR. LAMOND IN BEETHOVEN 

Mr. Frederick Lamond, the Scottish pianist, as an 
interpreter of Beethoven has few rivals. At this 
second recital of the composer's works at Bechstein 
Hall on Saturday afternoon he again displayed a 
complete sympathy and understanding of his material 
that extracted the very essence of aesthetic and musical 
value from each selection he undertook. The delight- 
ful intimacy of his playing and his unusual force of 
individual expression are invaluable assets, which, 
allied to his technical brilliancy, enable him to achieve 
an artistic triumph. The two lengthy Variations 
in E flat major (Op. 35) and in D major, the latter on 
the Turkish March from The Ruins of Athens, when 
included in the same programme, require a master 
hand to provide continuity of interest. To say that 
Mr. Lamond successfully avoided moments that might 
at times, in these works, have inclined to comparative 
disinterestedness, would be but a moderate way of ex- 
pressing the remarkable fascination with which his 
versatile playing endowed them, but at the same time 
two of the sonatas given included a similar form of 
composition, and no matter how intellectually bril- 
liant may be the interpretation, the extravagant use 
of a certain mode is bound in time to become some- 



Interlude: On Jargon in 

what ineffective. In the Three Sonatas, the E major 
(Op. 109), the A major (Op. 2), No. 2, and the C minor 
(Op. in), Mr. Lamond signalized his perfect insight 
into the composer's varying moods. 

Will you not agree with me that here is no writing, 
here is no prose, here is not even English, but 
merely a flux of words to the pen? 

Here again is a string, a concatenation — say, 
rather, a tiara of gems of purest ray serene from 
the dark unfathomed caves of a Scottish newspaper: 

The Chinese viewpoint, as indicated in this letter, 
may not be without interest to your readers, because 
it evidently is suggestive of more than an academic 
attempt to explain an unpleasant aspect of things 
which, if allowed to materialize, might suddenly cul- 
minate in disaster resembling the Chang-Sha riots. 
It also ventures to illustrate incidents having their 
inception in recent premature endeavours to acceler- 
ate the development of Protestant missions in China; 
but we would hope for the sake of the interests involved 
that what my correspondent describes as "the irre- 
sponsible ruffian element" may be known by their 
various religious designations only within very re- 
stricted areas. 

Well, the Chinese have given it up, poor fellows! 
and are asking the Christians — as to-day's news- 
papers inform us — to pray for them. Do you 
wonder? But that is, or was, the Chinese " view- 
point,' ' — and what a willow-pattern viewpoint! 



ii2 On the Art of Writing 

Observe its delicacy. It does not venture to 
interest or be interesting; merely "to be not with- 
out interest." But it does "venture to illustrate 
incidents" — which, for a viewpoint, is brave 
enough; and this illustration "is suggestive of 
something more than an academic attempt to 
explain an unpleasant aspect of things which, if 
allowed to materialise, might suddenly culminate." 
What materialises? The unpleasant aspect? or 
the things ? Grammar says the ' ' things, " " things 
which if allowed to materialise." But things are 
materialised already, and as a condition of their 
being things. It must be the aspect, then, that 
materialises. But, if so, it is also the aspect that 
culminates, and an aspect, however unpleasant, 
can hardly do that, or at worst cannot culminate 
in anything resembling the Chang-Sha riots. . . . 
I give it up. 

Let us turn to another trick of jargon; the trick 
of Elegant Variation, so rampant in the sport- 
ing press that there, without needing to attend 
these lectures, the undergraduate detects it for 
laughter : — 

Hay ward and C. B. Fry now faced the bowling, 
which apparently had no terrors for the Surrey crack. 
The old Oxonian, however, took some time in settling 
to work. . . . 



Interlude: On Jargon 113 

Yes, you all recognise it and laugh at it. But 
why do you practise it in your essays? An un- 
dergraduate brings me an essay on Byron. In 
an essay on Byron, Byron is (or ought to be) men- 
tioned many times. I expect, nay exact, that 
Byron shall be mentioned again and again. But 
my undergraduate has a blushing sense that to 
call Byron Byron twice on one page is indelicate. 
So Byron, after starting bravely as Byron, in the 
second sentence turns into "that great but unequal 
poet" and thenceforward I have as much trouble 
with Byron as ever Telemachus with Proteus to 
hold and pin him back to his proper self. Half- 
way down the page he becomes "the gloomy 
master of Newstead"; overleaf he is reincarnated 
into "the meteoric darling of society"; and so 
proceeds through successive avatars — "this arch- 
rebel," "the author of Childe Harold" "the apostle 
of scorn," "the ex-Harrovian, proud, but abnor- 
mally sensitive of his club-foot," "the martyr of 
Missolonghi," "the pageant-monger of a bleeding 
heart." Now this again is jargon. It does not, 
as most jargon does, come of laziness; but it comes 
of timidity, which is worse. In literature as in 
life he makes himself felt who not only calls a 
spade a spade but has the pluck to double spades 
and redouble. 



H4 On the Art of Writing 

For another rule — just as rough and ready, but 
just as useful: Train your suspicions to bristle up 
whenever you come upon "as regards," "with 
regard to," "in respect of," "in connection with," 
"according as to whether," and the like. They 
are all dodges of jargon, circumlocutions for evad- 
ing this or that simple statement; and I say that 
it is not enough to avoid them nine times out of 
ten, or nine-and-ninety times out of a hundred. 
You should never use them. That is positive 
enough, I hope? Though I cannot admire his 
style, I admire the man who wrote to me, "Re 
Tennyson — your remarks anent his In Memoriam 
make me sick"; for though re is not a preposition 
of the first water, and "anent" has enjoyed its 
day, the finish crowned the work. But here are 
a few specimens far, very far, worse: — 



The special difficulty in Professor Minocelsi's case 
[our old friend "case" again] arose in connexion with 
the view he holds relative to the historical value of the 
opening pages of Genesis. 



That is jargon. In prose, even taking the miser- 
able sentence as it stands constructed, we should 
write "the difficulty arose over the views he holds 
about the historical value," etc. 



Interlude: On Jargon 115 

From a popular novelist :— 

I was entirely indifferent as to the results of the 
game, caring nothing at all as to whether / had losses 
or gains— 

Cut out the first "as" in "as to," and the second 
"as to" altogether, and the sentence begins to 
be 'prose — "I was indifferent to the results of the 
game, caring nothing whether I had losses or 
gains." 

But why, like Dogberry, have "had losses"? 
Why not simply "lose." Let us try again. "I 
was entirely indifferent to the results of the game, 
caring nothing at all whether I won or lost." 

Still the sentence remains absurd; for the second 
clause but repeats the first without adding one 
jot. For if you care not at all whether you win or 
lose, you must be entirely indifferent to the results 
of the game. So why not say, "I was careless if 
I won or lost," and have done with it? 

A man of simple and charming character, he was 
fitly associated with the distinction of the Order of 
Merit. 

I take this gem with some others from a collec- 
tion made three years ago, by the Oxford Magazine; 
and I hope you admire it as one beyond price. 
"He was associated with the distinction of the 



n6 On the Art of Writing 

Order of Merit" means "he was given the Order 
of Merit." If the members of that Order make a 
society then he was associated with them; but 
you cannot associate a man with a distinction. 
The inventor of such fine writing would doubtless 
have answered Canning's Needy Knife-grinder 
with : — 



I associate thee with sixpence! I will see thee in 
another association first ! 



But let us close our florilegium and attempt to 
illustrate jargon by the converse method of taking 
a famous piece of English (say Hamlet's solil- 
oquy) and remoulding a few lines of it in this 
fashion : — 

To be, or the contrary ? Whether the former or the 
latter be preferable would seem to admit of some differ- 
ence of opinion; the answer in the present case being 
of an affirmative or of a negative character according 
as to whether one elects on the one hand to mentally 
suffer the disfavour of fortune, albeit in an extreme 
degree, or on the other to boldly envisage adverse 
conditions in the prospect of eventually bringing 
them to a conclusion. The condition of sleep is 
similar to, if not indistinguishable from that of death ; 
and with the addition of finality the former might 
be considered identical with the latter : so that in this 



Interlude: On Jargon 117 

connection it might be argued with regard to sleep 
that, could the addition be effected, a termination 
would be put to the endurance of a multiplicity of 
inconveniences, not to mention a number of down- 
right evils incidental to our fallen humanity, and 
thus a consummation achieved of a most gratifying 
nature. 



That is jargon: and to write jargon is to be per- 
petually shuffling around in the fog and cotton- 
wool of abstract terms ; to be for ever hearkening, 
like Ibsen's Peer Gynt, to the voice of the Boyg 
exhorting you to circumvent the difficulty, to beat 
the air because it is easier than to flesh your sword 
in the thing. The first virtue, the touchstone of 
masculine style, is its use of the active verb and 
the concrete noun. When you write in the 
active voice, "They gave him a silver teapot,' ' 
you write as a man. When you write "He was 
made the recipient of a silver teapot," you write 
jargon. But at the beginning set even higher 
store on the concrete noun. Somebody — I think 
it was FitzGerald — once posited the question, \ N 
"What would have become of Christianity if 
Jeremy Bentham had had the writing of the 
Parables?" Without pursuing that dreadful en- 
quiry I ask you to note how carefully the Parables 
— those exquisite short stories — speak only of 



u8 On the Art of Writing 

"things which you can touch and see"— "A 
sower went forth to sow," "The Kingdom of 
Heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took, " 
— and not the Parables only, but the Sermon on 
the Mount and almost every verse of the Gospel. 
The Gospel does not, like my young essayist, 
fear to repeat a word, if the word be good. The 
Gospel says "Render unto Caesar the things that 
are Caesar's" — not "Render unto Caesar the things 
that appertain to that potentate." The Gospel 
does not say "Consider the growth of the lilies," 
or even "Consider how the lilies grow." It says, 
"Consider the lilies, how they grow." 

Or take Shakespeare. I wager you that no 
writer of English so constantly chooses the con- 
crete word, in phrase after phrase forcing you to 
touch and see. No writer so insistently teaches 
the general through the particular. He does it 
even in Venus and Adonis (as Professor Wendell, 
of Harvard, pointed out in a brilliant little mono- 
graph on Shakespeare, published some ten years 
ago). Read any page of Venus and Adonis side 
by side with any page of Marlowe's Hero and 
Leander and you cannot but mark the contrast: 
in Shakespeare the definite, particular, visualised 
image, in Marlowe the beautiful generalisation, 
the abstract term, the thing seen at a literary 






Interlude: On Jargon 119 

remove. Take the two openings, both of which 
start out with the sunrise. Marlowe begins: — 

Now had the Morn espied her lover's steeds : 
Whereat she starts, puts on her purple weeds, 
And, red for anger that he stay'd so long, 
All headlong throws herself the clouds among. 

Shakespeare wastes no words on Aurora and her 
feelings, but gets to his hero and to business 
without ado: — 

Even as the sun with purple-colour'd face — 
(You have the sun visualised at once), 



Even as the sun with purple-colour'd face 
Had ta'en his last leave of the weeping morn, 
Rose-cheek'd Adonis hied him to the chase; 
Hunting he loved, but love he laugh'd to scorn. 



When Shakespeare has to describe a. horse, 
mark how definite he is :— 



Round-hoof d, short-jointed, fetlocks shag and long, 
Broad breast, full eye, small head and nostril wide, 
High crest, short ears, straight legs and passing strong; 
Thin mane, thick tail, broad buttock, tender hide. 



120 On the Art of Writing 

Or again, in a casual simile, how definite: — 

Upon this promise did he raise his chin, 
Like a dive-dipper peering through a wave, 
Which, being look'd on, ducks as quickly in. 

Or take, if you will, Marlowe's description of 
Hero's first meeting Leander: — 

It lies not in our power to love or hate, 
For will in us is over-ruled by fate . . . , 

and set against it Shakespeare's description of 
Venus' last meeting with Adonis, as she came on 
him lying in his blood : — 

Or as a snail whose tender horns being hit 
Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain, 
And there, all smother'd up, in shade doth sit, 
Long after fearing to creep forth again ; 
So, at his bloody view — 

I do not deny Marlowe's lines (if you will study the 
whole passage) to be lovely. You may even 
judge Shakespeare's to be crude by comparison. 
But you cannot help noting that whereas 
Marlowe steadily deals in abstract, nebulous 
terms, Shakespeare constantly uses concrete ones, 
which later on he learned to pack into verse, 
such as: — 

Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care. 



Interlude: On Jargon 121 

Is it unfair to instance Marlowe, who died 
young? Then let us take Webster for the com- 
parison; Webster, a man of genius or of some- 
thing very like it, and commonly praised by 
the critics for his mastery over definite, detailed, 
and what I may call solidified sensation. Let us 
take this admired passage from his Duchess of 
Malfy: — 

Ferdinand. How doth our sister Duchess bear herself 

In her imprisonment ? 
Basola. Nobly : I'll describe her. 

She's sad as one long wed to % and she 

seems 
Rather to welcome the end of misery 
Than shun it : a behaviour so noble 
As gives a majesty to adversity. z 
You may discern the shape of loveliness 
More perfect in her tears than in her 

smiles ; 
She will muse for hours together; 2 and 

her silence 
Methinks expresseth more than if she 

spake. 

Now set against this the well-known passage from 
Twelfth Night where the Duke asks and Viola 
answers a question about someone unknown to 
him and invented by her — a mere phantasm, in 

1 Note the abstract terms. 

2 Here we first come on the concrete: and beautiful it is. 



122 On the Art of Writing 

short: yet note how much more definite is the 
language: — 

Viola. My father had a daughter lov'd a man; 
As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman, 
I should your lordship. 

Duke And what's her history? 

Viola. A blank, my lord. She never told her love, 
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud, 
Feed on her damask cheek; she pined in 

thought, 
And with a green and yellow melancholy 
She sat like Patience on a monument 
Smiling at grief. Was not this love indeed ? 

Observe (apart from the dramatic skill of it) 
how, when Shakespeare has to use the abstract 
noun "concealment, " on an instant it turns into a 
visible worm "feeding" on the visible rose; how, 
having to use a second abstract word "patience," 
at once he solidifies it in tangible stone. 

Turning to prose, you may easily assure your- 
selves that men who have written learnedly on 
the art agree in treating our maxim — to prefer the 
concrete term to the abstract, the particular to the 
general, the definite to the vague — as a canon of 
rhetoric. Whately has much to say on it. The 
late Mr. E. J. Payne, in one of his admirable pre- 
faces to Burke (prefaces too little known and 
valued, as too often happens to scholarship hidden 



Interlude: On Jargon 



123 



away in a schoolbook) , illustrated the maxim by set- 
ting a passage from Burke's speech On Conciliation 
with America alongside a passage of like purport 
from Lord Brougham's Inquiry into the Policy of the 
European Powers. Here is the deadly parallel: — 



BURKE. 



BROUGHAM. 



In large bodies the 
circulation of power must 
be less vigorous at the 
extremities. Nature has 
said it. The Turk cannot 
govern JEgypt and Ara- 
bia andCurdistan as he 
governs Thrace; nor has 
he the same dominion in 
Crimea and Algiers which 
he has in Brusa and 
Smyrna. Despotism it- 
self is obliged to truck 
and huckster. The Sul- 
tan gets such obedience 
as he can. He governs 
with a loose rein, that he 
may govern at all; and 
the whole of the force 
and vigour of his author- 
ity in his centre is de- 
rived from a prudent 
relaxation in all his bor- 
ders. 



In all the despotisms of 
the East, it has been 
observed that the further 
any part of the empire 
is removed from the capi- 
tal, the more do its 
inhabitants enjoy some 
sort of rights and privi- 
leges: the more ineffica- 
cious is the power of the 
monarch; and the more 
feeble and easily decayed 
is the organisation of the 
government. 



124 On the Art of Writing 

You perceive that Brougham has transferred 
Burke's thought to his own page; but will you not 
also perceive how pitiably, by dissolving Burke's 
vivid particulars into smooth generalities, he has 
enervated its hold on the mind? 

"This particularising style," comments Mr. 
Payne, "is the essence of poetry; and in prose it 
is impossible not to be struck with the energy it 
produces. Brougham's passage is excellent in its 
way: but it pales before the flashing lights of 
Burke's sentences." The best instances of this 
energy of style, he adds, are to be found in the 
classical writers of the seventeenth century. 
"When South says, 'An Aristotle was but the 
rubbish of an Adam, and Athens but the rudiments 
of Paradise,' he communicates more effectually 
the notion of the difference between the intellect 
of fallen and of unfallen humanity than in all the 
philosophy of his sermons put together." 

You may agree with me, or you may not, that 
South in this passage is expounding trash ; but you 
will agree with Mr. Payne and me that he uttered 
it vividly. 

Let me quote to you, as a final example of this 
vivid style of writing, a passage from Dr. John 
Donne far beyond and above anything that ever 
lay within South 's compass: — 



Interlude: On Jargon 125 

The ashes of an Oak in the Chimney are no epitaph 
of that Oak, to tell me how high or how large that 
was; it tells me not what flocks it sheltered while it 
stood, nor what men it hurt when it fell. The dust 
of great persons' graves is speechless, too; it says 
nothing, it distinguishes nothing. As soon the 
dust of a wretch whom thou wouldest not, as of a 
prince whom thou couldest not look upon will trouble 
thine eyes if the wind blow it thither; and when a 
whirlewind hath blown the dust of the Churchyard 
into the Church, and the man sweep out the dust of 
the Church into the Churchyard, who will undertake 
to sift those dusts again and to pronounce, This is 
the Patrician, this is the noble flowre [flour], this the 
yeomanly, this the Plebeian bran ? So is the death of 
Iesabel (Iesabel was a Queen) expressed. They shall 
not say This is Iesabel; not only not wonder that it is, 
nor pity that it should be ; but they shall not say, they 
shall not know, This is Iesabel. 

Carlyle noted of Goethe, "his emblematic intel- 
lect, his never-failing tendency to transform into 
shape, into life, the feeling that may dwell in 
him. Everything has form, has visual excel- 
lence: the poet's imagination bodies forth the 
forms of things unseen, and his pen turns them 
into shape." 

Perpend this, Gentlemen, and maybe you will 
not hereafter set it down to my reproach that I 
wasted an hour of a May morning in a denuncia- 
tion of jargon, and in exhorting you upon a techni- 



126 On the Art of Writing 

cal matter at first sight so trivial as the choice be- 
tween abstract and definite words. 

A lesson about writing your language may go 
deeper than language ; for language (as in a former 
lecture I tried to preach to you) is your reason, 
your \0y05. So long as you prefer abstract words, 
which express other men's summarised concepts of 
things, to concrete ones which lie as near as can be 
reached to things themselves and are the first- 
hand material for your thoughts, you will remain, 
at the best, writers at second-hand. If your 
language be jargon, your intellect, if not your 
whole character, will almost certainly correspond. 
Where your mind should go straight, it will dodge: 
the difficulties it should approach with a fair 
front and grip with a firm hand it will be seeking 
to evade or circumvent. For the style is the man, 
and where a man's treasure is there his heart, and 
his brain, and his writing, will be also. 



VI 
On the Capital Difficulty of Prose 

To-day, Gentlemen, leaving the Vanity Fair of 
Jargon behind us, we have to essay a difficult 
country; of which, though fairly confident of his 
compass-bearings, your guide confesses that wide 
tracts lie outside his knowledge — outside of any- 
thing that can properly be called his knowledge. 
I feel indeed somewhat as Gideon must have felt 
when he divided his host on the slopes of Mount 
Gilead, warning back all who were afraid. In 
asking the remnant to follow as attentively as 
they can, I promise only that, if Heaven carry us 
safely across, we shall have "broken the back" 
of the desert. 

In my last lecture but one, then, — and before 
our small interlude with jargon — the argument 
had carried us, more or less neatly, up to this 
point: that the capital difficulty of verse con- 
sisted in saying ordinary unemotional things, 

of bridging the flat intervals between high mo- 

127 



128 On the Art of Writing 

ments. This point, I believe, we made effectively 
enough. 

Now, for logical neatness, we should be able to 
oppose a corresponding point, that the capital 
difficulty of prose consists in saying extraordinary 
things, in running it up from its proper level to 
these high emotional, musical, moments. And 
mightily convenient that would be, Gentlemen, 
if I were here to help you to answer scientific 
questions about prose and verse instead of helping 
you, in what small degree I can, to write. But 
in Literature (which, let me remind you yet once 
again, is an art) you cannot classify as in a science. 

Pray attend while I impress on you this most 
necessary warning. In studying literature, and 
still more in studying to write it, distrust all 
classification ! All classifying of literature intrudes 
" science" upon an art, and is artificially "scien- 
tific"; a trick of pedants, that they may make it 
the easier to examine you on things with which no 
man should have any earthly concern, as I am 
sure he will never have a heavenly one. Beetles, 
minerals, gases, may be classified; and to have 
them classified is not only convenient but a 
genuine advance of knowledge. But if you had 
to make a beetle, as men are making poetry, how 
much would classification help? To classify in a 



On Capital Difficulty of Prose 129 

science is necessary for the purpose of that science : 
to classify when you come to art is at the best an 
expedient, useful to some critics and to a multitude 
of examiners. It serves the art-critic to talk about 
Tuscan, Flemish, Pre-Raphaelite, schools of paint- 
ing. The expressions are handy, and we know 
more or less what they intend. Just so handily 
it may serve us to talk about " Renaissance poets," 
"the Elizabethans," "the Augustan age." But 
such terms at best cannot be scientific, precise, 
determinate, as for examples the terms "inorganic," 
"mammal," "univalve," "Old Red Sandstone" 
are scientific, precise, determinate. An animal is 
either a mammal or it is not: you cannot say as 
assuredly that a man is or is not an Elizabethan. 
We call Shakespeare an Elizabethan and the 
greatest of Elizabethans, though as a fact he wrote 
his most famous plays when Elizabeth was dead. 
Shirley was but seven years old when Elizabeth 
died; yet (if "Elizabethan" have any meaning but 
a chronological one) Shirley belongs to the Eliza- 
bethan firmament, albeit but as a pale star low on 
the horizon : whereas Donne — a post-Elizabethan if 
ever there was one — had by 1603 reached his thirti- 
eth year and written almost every line of those won- 
derful lyrics which for a good sixty years gave the 
dominant note to Jacobean and Caroline poetry. 



130 On the Art of Writing 

In treating of an art we classify for handiness, 
not for purposes of exact knowledge; and man 
(improbus homo) with his wicked inventions is for 
ever making fools of our formulae. Be consoled — 
and, if you are wise, thank Heaven — that genius 
uses our best-laid logic to explode it. 

Be consoled, at any rate, on finding that after 
deciding the capital difficulty of prose to lie in 
saying extraordinary things, in running up to the 
high emotional moments, the prose- writers explode 
and blow our admirable conclusions to ruins. 

You see, we gave them the chance to astonish 
us when we defined prose as "a record of human 
thought, dispensing with metre and using rhythm 
laxly." When you give genius leave to use some- 
thing laxly, at its will, genius will pretty surely get 
the better of you. 

Observe, now, following the story of English 
prose, what has happened. Its difficulty — the 
inherent, the native disability of prose — is to 
handle the high emotional moments which more 
properly belong to verse. Well, we strike into the 
line of our prose-writers, say as early as Malory. 
We come on this; of the Passing of Arthur: — 

1 ' My time hieth fast, ' ' said the king. Therefore said 
Arthur unto Sir Bedivere, "Take thou Excalibur my 
good sword, and go with it to yonder water side; and 



On Capital Difficulty of Prose 131 

when thou comest there I charge thee throw my sword 
in that water and come again and tell me what there 
thou seest." "My lord," said Bedivere, "Your 
commandment shall be done; and lightly bring you 
word again." So Sir Bedivere departed, and by the 
way he beheld that noble sword, that the pommel 
and the haft was all of precious stones, and then he 
said to himself, "If I throw this rich sword in the 
water, thereof shall never come good, but harm and 
loss." And then Sir Bedivere hid Excalibur under a 
tree. And so, as soon as he might, he came again 
unto the king, and said he had been at the water and 
had thrown the sword into the water, "What saw thou 
there ? ' ' said the king. ' ' Sir, ' ' he said, ' ' I saw nothing 
but waves and winds." 

Now I might say a dozen things of this and of 
the whole passage that follows, down to Arthur's 
last words. Specially might I speak to you of the 
music of its monosyllables — " 'What saw you there?' 
said the king. . . . 'Do as well as thou mayest; 
for in me is no trust for to trust in. For I will into 
the Vale of Avilion, to heal me of my grievous 
wound. And if thou hear never more of me, 
pray for my soul. ' " But, before making comment 
at all, I shall quote you another passage ; this from 
Lord Berners* translation of Froissart, of the 
death of Robert Bruce : — 

It fortuned that King Robert of Scotland was right 
sore aged and feeble : for he was greatly charged with 



132 On the Art of Writing 

the great sickness, so that there was no way for him 
but death. And when he felt that his end drew near, 
he sent for such barons and lords of his realm as he 
trusted best, and shewed them how there was no 
remedy with him, but he must needs leave this 
transitory life. . . . Then he called to him the gentle 
knight, Sir William Douglas, and said before all the 
lords, "Sir William, my dear friend, ye know well 
that I have had much ado in my days to uphold and 
sustain the right of this realm; and when I had most 
ado I made a solemn vow, the which as yet I have not 
accomplished, whereof I am right sorry; the which 
was, if I might achieve and make an end of all my 
wars, so that I might once have brought this realm in 
rest and peace, then I promised in my mind to have 
gone and warred on Christ's enemies, adversaries to 
our holy Christian faith. To this purpose mine heart 
hath ever intended, but our Lord would not consent 
thereto. . . . And sith it is so that my body can not 
go, nor achieve that my heart desireth, I will send the 
heart instead of the body, to accomplish mine avow. 
... I will, that as soon as I am trespassed out of 
this world, that ye take my heart out of my body, and 
embalm it, and take of my treasure as ye shall think 
sufficient for that enterprise, both for yourself and 
such company as ye will take with you, and present 
my heart to the Holy Sepulchre, whereas our Lord 
lay, seeing my body can not come there. And take 
with you such company and purveyance as shall be 
appertaining to your estate. And, wheresoever ye 
come, let it be known how ye carry with you the heart 
of King Robert of Scotland, at his instance and 
desire to be presented to the Holy Sepulchre." Then 
all the lords, that heard these words, wept for pity. 



On Capital Difficulty of Prose 133 

There, in the fifteenth century and early in the 
sixteenth, you have Malory and Berners writing 
beautiful English prose ; prose the emotion of which 
(I dare to say) you must recognise if you have ears 
to hear. So you see that already our English 
prose not only achieves the "high moment," but 
seems to obey it rather and be lifted by it, until we 
ask ourselves, "Who could help writing nobly, 
having to tell how King Arthur died or how the 
Bruce?" Yes, but I bid you observe that Malory 
and Berners are both relating what, however 
noble, is quite simple, quite straightforward. It 
is when prose attempts to philosophise, to express 
thoughts as well as to relate simple sayings and 
doings — it is then that the trouble begins. When 
Malory has to philosophise death, to think about 
it, this is as far as he attains: — 

"Ah, Sir Lancelot," said he, "thou wert head of all 
Christian Knights! And now I dare say," said Sir 
Ector, "that, Sir Lancelot, there thou liest, thou were 
never matched of none earthly hands; and thou were 
the curtiest knight that ever bare shield: and thou 
were the truest friend to thy lover that ever strood 
horse, and thou were the truest lover of a sinful man 
that ever loved woman; and thou were the kindest 
man that ever strooke with sword; and thou were 
the goodliest person that ever came among press of 
knights ; and thou were the meekest man and gentlest 
that ever sat in hall among ladies; and thou were the 



134 On the Art of Writing 

sternest Knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear 
in the rest." 

Beautiful again, I grant! But note you that, 
eloquent as he can be on the virtues of his dead 
friend, when Sir Ector comes to the thought of 
death itself all he can accomplish is, "And now 
I dare say that, Sir Lancelot, there thou liest." 

Let us make a leap in time and contrast this 
with Tyndale and the translators of our Bible, 
how they are able to make St. Paul speak of 
death: — 

So when this corruptible shall have put on incorrup- 
tion, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, 
then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, 
Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is 
thy sting ? grave, where is thy victory ? 

There you have something clean beyond what 
Malory or Berners could compass: there you have 
a different kind of high moment — a high moment 
of philosophising: there you have emotion im- 
pregnated with thought. It was necessary that 
our English verse even after Chaucer, our English 
prose after Malory and Berners, should overcome 
this most difficult gap (which stands for a real 
intellectual difference) if it aspired to be what 
to-day it is — a language of the first class, compar- 



On Capital Difficulty of Prose 135 

able with Greek and certainly no whit inferior 
to Latin or French. 



Let us leave prose for a moment, and see how 
Verse threw its bridge over the gap. If you would 
hear the note of Chaucer at its deepest, you will 
find it in the famous exquisite lines of the Prioress' 
Prologue : — 

O moder mayde ! mayde moder f re ! 

O bush unbrent, brenning in Moyses' sight! 

in the complaint of Troilus, in the rapture of 
Griselda restored to her children : — 

tendre, O dere, O yonge children myne, 
Your woful moder wende stedfastly 

That cruel houndes or some foul vermyne 
Hadde eten you; but God of his mercy 
And your benigne fader tendrely 

Hath doon you kept. . . . 

You will find a note quite as sincere in many a 
carol, many a ballad, of that time : — 

He came al so still 

There his mother was, 
As dew in April 

That falleth on the grass. 



136 On the Art of Writing 

He came al so still 

To his mother's bour, 
As dew in April 

That falleth on the flour. 

He came al so still 

There his mother lay, 
As dew in April 

That falleth on the spray. 

Mother and maiden 

Was never none but she; 
Well may such a lady 

Goddes mother be. 

You get the most emotional note of the Ballad in 
such a stanza as this, from The Nut-Brown Maid: — 

Though it be sung of old and young 

That I should be to blame, 
Theirs be the charge that speak so large 

In hurting of my name; 
For I will prove that faithful love 

It is devoid of shame; 
In your distress and heaviness 

To part with you the same: 
And sure all tho that do not so 

True lovers are they none : 
For, in my mind, of all mankind 

I love but you alone. 

All these notes, again, you will admit to be exquis- 
ite : but they gush straight from the unsophisticated 



On Capital Difficulty of Prose 137 

heart : they are nowise deep save in innocent emo- 
tion: they are not thoughtful. So when Barbour 
breaks out in praise of Freedom, he cries 

A ! Fredome is a noble thing ! 

And that is really as far as he gets. He goes on 
Fredome mayse man to hafe liking. 

(Freedom makes man to choose what he likes; 
that is, makes him free) 

Fredome all solace to man giffis, 
He livis at ese that f rely livis ! 
A noble hart may haif nane ese, 
Na ellys nocht that may him plese, 
Gif fredome fail'th: for fre liking 
Is yharnit ouer all othir thing. . . . 

— and so on for many lines; all saying the same 
thing, that man yearns for Freedom and is glad 
when he gets it, because then he is free ; all ham- 
mering out the same observed fact, but all knock- 
ing vainly on the door of thought, which never 
opens to explain what Freedom is. 

Now let us take a leap as we did with prose, and 
"taking off" from the Nut-Brown Maid's artless 
confession, 

in my mind, of all mankind 
I love but you alone, 



138 On the Art of Writing 

let us alight on a sonnet of Shakespeare's — 

Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts 

Which I by lacking have supposed dead: 
And there reigns Love, and all Love's loving parts, 

And all those friends which I thought buried. 
How many a holy and obsequious tear 

Hath dear religious love stolen from mine eye 
As interest of the dead ! — which now appear 

But things removed, that hidden in thee lie. 
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live, 

Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone, 
Who all their parts of me to thee did give; 

— That due of many now is thine alone: 
Their images I loved I view in thee, 
And thou, all they, hast all the all of me. 

What a new way of talking about love! Not a 
happier way — there is less of heart's-ease in these 
doubts, delicacies, subtleties — but how much more 
thoughtful ! How has our Nut-Brown Maid eaten 
of the tree of knowledge ! 

Well, there happened a Shakespeare, to do this 
for English Verse: and Shakespeare was a miracle 
which I cheerfully leave others to rationalise for 
you, having, for my own part and so far as I have 
fared in life, found more profit in a capacity for 
simple wonder. 

But I can tell you how the path was made 
straight to that miracle. The shock of the New 



On Capital Difficulty of Prose 139 

Learning upon Europe awoke men and unsealed 
men's eyes — unsealed the eyes of Englishmen in 
particular — to discover a literature, and the finest 
in the world, which habitually philosophised life: a 
literature which, whether in a chorus of Sophocles 
or a talk reported by Plato, or in a ribald page of 
Aristophanes or in a knotty chapter of Thucydides, 
was in one guise or another for ever asking Why? 
"What is man doing here, and why is he doing it?" 
"What is his purpose? his destiny?" "How 
stands he towards those unseen powers — call them 
the gods, or whatever you will — that guide and 
thwart, provoke, madden, control him so mysteri- 
ously?" "What are these things we call good 
and evil, life, love, death?" 

These are questions which, once raised, haunt 
Man until he finds an answer — some sort of answer 
to satisfy him. Englishmen, hitherto content with 
the Church's answers but now aware of this great 
literature which answered so differently — and 
having other reasons to suspect what the Church 
said and did — grew aware that their literature had 
been as a child at play. It had never philoso- 
phised good and evil, life, love, or death : it had no 
literary forms for doing this; it had not even the 
vocabulary. So our ancestors saw that to catch 
up their lee-way — to make their report worthy 



140 On the Art of Writing 

of this wonderful, alluring discovery — new literary 
forms had to be invented — new, that is, in English : 
the sonnet, the drama, the verse in which the actors 
were to declaim, the essay, the invented tale. 
Then, for the vocabulary, obviously our fathers 
had either to go to Greek, which had invented the 
A. B. C. of philosophising; or to seek in the other 
languages which were already ahead of English 
in adapting that alphabet; or to give our English 
words new contents, new connotations, new 
meanings; or lastly, to do all three together. 

Well, it was done ; and in verse very fortunately 
done ; thanks of course to many men, but thanks to 
two especially — to Sir Thomas Wyat, who led our 
poets to Italy, to study and adopt the forms in which 
Italy had cast its classical heritage; and to Mar- 
lowe, who impressed blank verse upon the drama. 
Of Marlowe I shall say nothing ; for with what he 
achieved you are familiar enough. Of Wyat I 
may speak at length to you, one of these days ; but 
here, to prepare you for what I hope then to prove 
— that Wyat is one of the heroes of our literature — 
I will give you three brief reasons why we should 
honour his memory: — 

(i) He led the way. On the value of that 
service I shall content myself with quoting a 
passage from Newman: — 



On Capital Difficulty of Prose 141 

When a language has been cultivated in any particu- 
lar department of thought, and so far as it has been 
generally perfected, an existing want has been sup- 
plied, and there is no need for further workmen. In 
its earliest times, while it is yet unformed, to write in 
it at all is almost a work of genius. It is like crossing 
a country before roads are made communicating 
between place and place. The authors of that age 
deserve to be Classics both because of what they do 
and because they can do it. It requires the courage 
and force of great talent to compose in the language 
at all; and the composition, when effected, makes a 
permanent impression on it. 

This Wyat did. He was a pioneer and opened 
up a new country to Englishmen. But he did 
more. 

(2) Secondly, he had the instinct to perceive 
that the lyric, if it would philosophise life, love, and 
the rest, must boldly introduce the personal note: 
since in fact when man asks questions about his 
fortune or destiny he asks them most effectively in 
the first person. "What am / doing? Why are 
we mortal ? Why do / love thee ? ' ' 

This again Wyat did: and again he did more. 

For (3) thirdly — and because of this I am 
surest of his genius — again and again, using new 
thoughts in unfamiliar forms, he wrought out the 
result in language so direct, economical, natural, 
easy, that I know to this day no one who can better 



142 On the Art of Writing 

Wyat's best in combining straight speech with 
melodious cadence. Take the lines Is it possible ? — 

Is it possible? 

For to turn so oft ; 
To bring that lowest that was most aloft : 
And to fall highest, yet to light soft? 

Is it possible? 

All is possible! 

Whoso list believe; 
Trust therefore first, and after preve; 
As men wed ladies by licence and leave, 

All is possible! 

or again — 

Forget not ! forget not this ! — 
How long ago hath been, and is, 
The mind that never meant amiss : 
Forget not yet ! 

or again (can personal note go straighter?) — 

And wilt thou leave me thus ? 
Say nay, say nay, for shame! 
— To save thee from the blame 
Of all my grief and grame. 
And wilt thou leave me thus? 
Say nay! say nay! 1 

1 Say "nay," say "nay"; and don't say, "the answer is in the 
negative." 



On Capital Difficulty of Prose 143 

No: I have yet to mention the straightest, most 
natural of them all, and will read it to you in full — 

What should I say? 

— Since Faith is dead 
And Truth away 
From you is fled ? 
Should I be led 
With doubleness ? 
Nay! nay! mistress. 

I promised you 

And you promised me 
To be as true 
As I would be: 
But since I see 
You double heart, 
Farewell my part ! 

Thought for to take 

Is not my mind; 
But to forsake 
One so unkind; 
And as I find, 
So will I trust, 
Farewell, unjust! 

Can ye say nay 

But that you said 
That I alway 

Should be obeyed ? 
And — thus betrayed 
Or that I wist ! 
Farewell, unkist! 



144 On the Art of Writing 

I observe it noted on p. 190 of Volume III of 
The Cambridge History of English Literature that 
Wyat "was a pioneer and perfection was not to be 
expected of him. He has been described as a man 
stumbling over obstacles, continually falling but 
always pressing forward." I know not to what 
wiseacre we owe that pronouncement : but what do 
you think of it, after the lyric I have just quoted ? 
I observe, further, on p. 26 of the same volume of 
the same work, that the Rev. T. M. Lindsay, D.D., 
Principal of the Glasgow College of the United 
Free Church of Scotland, informs us of Wilson's 
Arte of Rhetorique that 

there is little or no originality in the volume, save, 
perhaps, the author's condemnation of the use of 
French and Italian phrases and idioms, which he 
complains are "counterfeiting the kinges Englishe." 
The warnings of Wilson will not seem untimely if it 
be remembered that the earlier English poets of the 
period — Sir Thomas Wyatt the elder, and the Earl of 
Surrey — drew their inspiration from Petrarch and 
Ariosto, that their earliest attempts at poetry were 
translations from Italian sonnets, and that their 
maturer efforts were imitations of the sweet and 
stately measures and style of Italian poesie. The 
polish which men like Wyatt and Surrey were 
praised for giving to our "rude and homely man- 
ner of vulgar poesie" might have led to some de- 
generation. 



On Capital Difficulty of Prose 145 

Might it, indeed? As another Dominie would 
have said, "Pro-digious." 1 

But I have lingered too long with this favourite 
poet of mine and left myself room only to hand you 
the thread by following which you will come to the 
melodious philosophising of Shakespeare's Son- 
nets — 

Let me not to the marriage of true Minds 
Admit impediment. Love is not love 

Which alters where it alteration finds 
Or bends with the remover to remove. 

Note the Latin words "impediment," "altera- 
tion," "remove." We are using the language of 
philosophy here or, rather, the "universal lan- 
guage," which had taken over the legacy of Greek. 
You may trace the use of it growing as, for example, 
you trace it through the Elizabethan song-books: 
and then (as I said) comes Shakespeare, and with 
vShakespeare the miracle. 

The education of Prose was more difficult, and 
went through more violent convulsions. I suppose 
that the most of us — if, after reading a quantity of 

1 Thought for to take 
Is not my mind; 
But to forsake 
This Principal of the Glasgow College of the United Free 
Church of Scotland- 
Farewell, unkiss'd! 



146 On the Art of Writing 

Elizabethan prose, we had the courage to tell plain 
truth, undaunted by the name of a great epoch — 
would confess to finding the mass of it clotted in sense 
as well as unmusical in sound, a disappointment al- 
most intolerable after the simple melodious clarity of 
Malory and Berners. I, at any rate, must own that 
the most of Elizabethan prose pleases me little ; and 
I speak not of Elizabethan prose at its worst, of 
such stuff as disgraced the already disgraceful Mar- 
tin Marprelate Controversy, but of such as a really 
ingenious and ingenuous man like Thomas Nashe 
could write at his average. For a sample: — 

English Seneca read by candle-light yields many 
good sentences such as "Blood is a beggar" and so 
forth; and if you entreat him fair on a frosty 
morning, he will afford you whole Hamlets, I 
should say handfuls of tragical speeches. . . . 
Sufficeth them [that is, modern followers of Seneca] 
to bodge up a blank verse with if s and and's, and 
others, while for recreation after their candle-stuff 
having starched their beards most curiously, to make 
a peripatetical path into the inner parts of the city, and 
spend two or three hours in turning over the French 
Doudie, where they attract more infection in one minute 
than they can do eloquence all the days of their life 
by conversing with any authors of like argument. 

This may be worth studying historically, to under- 
stand the difficulties our prose had to encounter 



On Capital Difficulty of Prose 147 

and overcome. But no one would seriously 
propose it as a model for those who would write 
well, which is our present business. I have called 
it "clotted." It is, to use a word of the time, 
"farced" with conceits; it needs straining. 

Its one merit consists in this, that it is struggling, 
fumbling, to say something: that is, to make 
something. It is not, like modern jargon, trying 
to dodge something. English prose, in short, 
just here is passing through a period of pu- 
berty, of green sickness: and, looking at it his- 
torically, we may own that its throes are 
commensurate with the stature of the grown man 
to be. * 

These throes tear it every way. On the one 
hand we have Ascham, pedantically enough, 
apologising that he writes in the English tongue 
(yet with a sure instinct he does it) : 

If any man would blame me, either for taking such a 
matter in hand, or else for writing it in the English 
tongue, this answer I may make him, that what the 
best of the realm think it honest for them to use, I, 
one of the meanest sort, ought not to suppose it vile 
for me to write. . . . And as for the Latin or Greek 
tongue, everything is so excellently done in them that 
none can do better. In the English tongue, contrary, 
everything in a manner so meanly, both for the matter 
and the handling, that no man can do worse. 



148 On the Art of Writing 

On the other hand you have euphuism with its 
antithetical tricks and poises, taking all prose by 
storm for a time: euphuism, to be revived two 
hundred years later, and find a new avatar in the 
Johnsonian balance; euphuism, dead now, yet 
alive enough in its day. 

For all these writers were alive: and I tell you 
it is an inspiriting thing to be alive and trying 
to write English. All these authors were alive 
and trying to do something. Unconsciously for 
the most part they were striving to philosophise 
the vocabulary of English prose and find a rhythm 
for its periods. 

And then, as already had happened to our 
verse, to our prose too there befel a miracle. 

You will not ask me "What miracle? " I mean, 
of course, the Authorised Version of the Bible. 

I grant you, to be sure, that the path to the 
Authorised Version was made straight by pre- 
vious translators, notably by William Tyndale. I 
grant you that Tyndale was a man of genius, and 
Wyclif before him a man of genius. I grant you 
that the forty-seven men who produced the 
Authorised Version worked in the main upon 
Tyndale's version, taking that for their basis. 
Nay, if you choose to say that Tyndale was a 
miracle in himself, I cheerfully grant you that as 



On Capital Difficulty of Prose 149 

well. But, in a lecture one must not multiply 
miracles praeter necessitatem; and when Tyndale 
has been granted you have yet to face the miracle 
that forty-seven men — not one of them known, 
outside of this performance, for any superlative 
talent — sat in committee and almost consistently, 
over a vast extent of work — improved upon what 
Genius had done. I give you the word of an old 
committee-man that this is not the way of com- 
mittees — that only by miracle is it the way of 
any committee. Doubtless the forty-seven were 
all good men and godly: but doubtless also good 
and godly were the Dean and Chapter who dealt 
with Alfred Steven's tomb of the Duke of Welling- 
ton in St. Paul's Cathedral; and you know what 
they did. Individual genius such as Tyndale's 
or even Shakespeare's, though we cannot explain 
it, we may admit as occurring somehow, and not 
incredibly, in the course of nature. But that a 
large committee of forty-seven should have gone 
steadily through the great mass of Holy Writ, 
seldom interfering with genius, yet, when interfer- 
ing, seldom missing to improve: that a committee 
of forty-seven should have captured (or even, 
let us say, should have retained and improved) a 
rhythm so personal, so constant, that our Bible 
has the voice of one author speaking through 



ISO On the Art of Writing 

its many mouths: that, Gentlemen, is a wonder 
before which I can only stand humble and aghast. 
Does it or does it not strike you as queer that 
the people who set you "courses of study* ' in 
English Literature never include the Authorised 
Version, which not only intrinsically but histori- 
cally is out and away the greatest book of English 
Prose. Perhaps they pay you the silent compli- 
ment of supposing that you are perfectly ac- 
quainted with it? . . . I wonder. It seems as if 
they thought the Martin Marprelate Controversy, 
for example, more important somehow. 

' 'So when this corruptible shall have put on incor- 
ruption, and this mortal shall have put on immor- 
tality. 

"Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the 
floods drown it : if a man would give all the substance 
of his house for love, it would utterly be contemned. M 

"The king's daughter is all glorious within: her 
clothing is of wrought gold." 

"Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty: they 
shall behold the land that is very far off." 

"And a man shall be as an hiding-place from the 
wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of 
water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a 
weary land." 



On Capital Difficulty of Prose 151 

When a nation has achieved this manner of 
diction, those rhythms for its dearest beliefs, a 
literature is surely established. Just there I find 
the effective miracle, making the blind to see, the 
lame to leap. Wyclif, Tyndale, Coverdale, and 
others before the forty-seven had wrought. The 
Authorised Version, setting a seal on all, set a 
seal on our national style, thinking and speaking. 
It has cadences homely and sublime, yet so 
harmonises them that the voice is always one. 
Simple men — holy and humble men of heart like 
Isaak Walton or Bunyan — have their lips touched 
and speak to the homelier tune. Proud men, 
scholars, — Milton, Sir Thomas Browne — practice 
the rolling Latin sentence; but upon the rhythms 
of our Bible they, too, fall back. "The great 
mutations of the world are acted, or time may be 
too short for our designs." "Acquaint thyself 
with the Ghoragium of the stars." "There is 
nothing immortal but immortality." The precise 
man Addison cannot excel one parable in brevity 
or in heavenly clarity : the two parts of Johnson's 
antithesis come to no more than this, "Our Lord 
has gone up to the sound of a trump: with the 
sound of a trump our Lord has gone up." The 
Bible controls its enemy Gibbon as surely as it 
haunts the curious music of a light sentence 



152 On the Art of Writing 

of Thackeray's. It is in everything we see, hear, 
feel, because it is in us, in our blood. 

What madman, then, will say "Thus or thus 
far shalt thou go" to a prose thus invented and 
thus with its free rhythms, after three hundred 
years, working on the imagination of Englishmen? 
Or who shall determine its range, whether of 
thought or of music? You have received it by 
inheritance, Gentlemen : it is yours, freely yours — 
to direct your words through life as well as your 
hearts. 



VII 
Some Principles Reaffirmed 

Let me begin to-day, Gentlemen, with a foot- 
note to my last lecture. It ended, as you may 
remember, upon an earnest appeal to you, if you 
would write good English, to study the Authorised 
Version of the Scriptures; to learn from it, more- 
over, how by mastering rhythm, our Prose over- 
came the capital difficulty of Prose and attuned 
itself to rival its twin instrument, Verse; compass- 
ing almost equally with Verse man's thought 
however sublime, his emotion however profound. 

Now in the course of my remarks I happened— 
maybe a little'incautiously — to call the Authorised 
Version a " miracle " ; using that word in a colloquial 
sense, in which no doubt you accepted it ; meaning 
no more than that the thing passed my under- 
standing. I have allowed that the famous forty- 
seven owed an immense deal to earlier translators — 
to the Bishops, to Tyndale, to the Wyclif Version, 

as themselves allowed it eagerly in their preface : — 

153 



154 On the Art of Writing 

Truly (good Christian reader) wee never thought 
from the beginning that we should needs to make a 
new Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good 
one . . . but to make a good one better, or out of 
many good ones one principall good one, not justly 
to be excepted against : that hath bene our indeavour, 
that our marke. x 

Nevertheless the Authorised Version astounds 
me, as I believe it will astound you when you 
compare it with earlier translations. Aristotle 
(it has been said) invented Chance to cover the 
astonishing fact that there were certain phe- 
nomena for which he found himself wholly un- 
able to account. Just so, if one may compare 
very small things with very great, I spoke of the 
Authorised Version as a " miracle.' ' It was, 
it remains, marvellous to me. 

Should these deciduous discourses ever come to 
be pressed within the leaves of a book, I believe 
their general meaning will be as clear to readers as 
I hope it is to you who give me so much plea- 
sure by pursuing them — almost (shall I say?) like 
Wordsworth's Kitten with those other falling 
leaves: — 

That almost I could repine 

That your transports are not mine. 

1 See note at the end of this Lecture. 



Some Principles Reaffirmed 155 

But meanwhile certain writers in the newspapers 
are assuming that by this word "miracle" I meant 
to suggest to you a something like plenary inspira- 
tion in these forty-seven men ; an inspiration at once 
supernatural and so authoritative that it were 
sacrilege now to alter their text by one jot or 
tittle. 

Believe me, I intended nothing of the sort: for 
that, in my plain opinion, would be to make a 
fetish of the book. One of these days I hope 
to discuss with you what inspiration is: with 
what accuracy — with what meaning, if any — we 
can say of a poet that he is inspired; questions 
which have puzzled many wise men from Plato 
downwards. 

But certainly I never dreamt of claiming 
plenary inspiration for the forty-seven. Nay, if 
you will have it, they now and again wrote stark 
nonsense. Remember that I used this very same 
word "miracle" of Shakespeare, meaning again 
that the total Shakespeare quite outpasses my 
comprehension; yet Shakespeare, too, on occasion 
talks stark nonsense, or at any rate stark bombast. 
He never blotted a line — "I would he had blotted 
a thousand," says Ben Jonson: and Ben Jonson 
was right. Shakespeare could have blotted out 
two or three thousand lines : he was great enough 



156 On the Art of Writing 

to afford it. Somewhere Matthew Arnold sup- 
poses us as challenging Shakespeare over this and 
that weak or bombastic passage, and Shakespeare 
answering with his tolerant smile, that no doubt 
we were right, but after all, "Did it greatly 
matter?" 

So we offer no real derogation to the forty-seven 
in asserting that here and there they wrote non- 
sense. They could afford it. But we do stultify 
criticism if, adoring the grand total of wisdom and 
beauty, we prostrate ourselves indiscriminately 
before what is good and what is bad, what is sub- 
lime sense and what is nonsense, and forbid any 
reviser to put forth a hand to the ark. 

The most of us Christians go to church on 
Christmas Day, and there we listen to this from 
Isaiah, chapter ix, verses 1-7 : — 

Nevertheless the dimness shall not be such as was 
in her vexation, when at the first he lightly afflicted 
the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, and 
afterward did more grievously afflict her by the way 
of the sea, beyond Jordan, in Galilee of the nations. 

The people that walked in darkness have seen a 
great light : they that dwell in the land of the shadow 
of death, upon them hath the light shined. 

Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not increased 
the joy: they joy before thee according to the joy in 
harvest, and as men rejoice when they divide the spoil. 



Some Principles Reaffirmed 157 

For thou hast broken the yoke of his burden, and 
the staff of his shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, as in 
the day of Midian. 

For every battle of the warrior is with confused 
noise, and garments rolled in blood: but this shall 
be with burning and fuel of fire. 

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. 

The forty-seven keep their majestic rhythm. But 
have you ever, sitting in church on a Christmas 
morning, asked yourself what it all means, or if it 
mean anything more than a sing-song according 
somehow with the holly and ivy around the pillars ? 
"Thou hast multiplied the nation, and not increased 
the joy : they joy before thee according to the joy in 
harvest." But why — if the joy be not increased? 
11 For every battle of the warrior is with confused 
noise, and garments rolled in blood: but this shall 
be with burning and fuel of fire." Granted the 
rhythmical antithesis, where is the real antithe- 
sis, the difference, the improvement? If a battle 
there must be, how is burning better than gar- 
ments rolled in blood ? And, in fine, what is it all 
about ? Now let us turn to the Revised Version : — 



But there shall be no gloom to her that was in 
anguish. In the former time he brought into con- 
tempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, 
but in the latter time hath he made it glorious, by 



158 On the Art of Writing 

the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, Galilee of the 
nations. 

The people that walked in darkness have seen a 
great light : they that dwelt in the land of the shadow 
of death, upon them hath the light shined. Thou 
hast multiplied the nation, thou hast increased their 
joy: they joy before thee according to the joy in har- 
vest, as men rejoice when they divide the spoil. 

For the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his 
shoulder, the rod of his oppressor, thou hast broken as 
in the day of Midian. 

For all the armour of the armed man in the tumult, 
and the garments rolled in blood, shall even be for 
burning, for fuel of fire. 

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; 
and the government shall be upon his shoulder: 
and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, 
Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. 

I say (knowing no Hebrew, merely assuming our 
Revisers to be at least no worse scholars than the 
forty-seven) that here, with the old cadences kept 
so far as possible, we are given sense in place of 
nonsense: and I ask you to come to the Revised 
Version with a fair mind. I myself came to it 
with some prejudice; in complete ignorance of 
Hebrew, and with no more than the usual amount 
of Hellenistic Greek. I grant at once that the 
Revised New Testament was a literary fiasco; 
largely due (if gossip may be trusted) to trouble 
with the Greek Aorist, and an unwise decision — in 



Some Principles Reaffirmed 159 

my opinion the most gratuitously unwise a trans- 
lator can take — to use one and the same English 
word, always and in every connotation, as repre- 
senting one and the same Greek word: for in any 
two languages few words are precisely equivalent. 
A fiasco at any rate the Revised New Testament 
was, deserving in a dozen ways and in a thousand 
passages the scorn which Professor Saintsbury has 
recently heaped on it. But I protest against the 
injustice of treating the two Revisions — of the 
New Testament and of the Old — as a single work, 
and saddling the whole with the sins of a part. 
For two years I spent half-an-hour daily in read- 
ing the Authorised and Revised Versions side by 
side, marking as I went, and in this way worked 
through the whole — Old Testament, Apocrypha, 
New Testament. I came to it (as I have said) 
with some prejudice; but I closed the books on a 
conviction, which my notes sustain for me, that 
the Revisers of the Old Testament performed 
their task delicately, scrupulously, on the whole 
with great good judgment; that the critic does a 
wrong who brings them under his indiscriminate 
censure; that on the whole they have clarified the 
sense of the Authorised Version while respecting 
its consecrated rhythms; and that — to name an 
example, that you may test my words and judge 



160 On the Art of Writing 

for yourselves — the solemn splendour of that 
most wonderful poem, the story of Job, BcaXa^xet, 
11 shines through" the new translation as it never 
shone through the old. 

And now, Gentlemen (as George Herbert said 
on a famous occasion), let us tune our instru- 
ments. 

Before discussing with you another and highly 
important question of style in writing, I will ask 
you to look back for a few moments on the road 
we have travelled. 

We have agreed that our writing should be 
appropriate: that it should fit the occasion ; that it 
should rise and fall with the subject, be grave 
where that is serious, where it is light not afraid of 
what Stevenson in The Wrong Box calls "a little 
judicious levity." If your writing observe these 
precepts, it will be well-mannered writing. 

To be sure, much in addition will depend on 
yourself — on what you are or have made yourself, 
since in writing the style can never be separated 
from the man. But neither can it in the practice 
of virtue : yet, though men differ in character, I do 
not observe that moralists forbear from laying 
down general rules of excellence. Now if you will 



Some Principles Reaffirmed 161 

recall our further conclusion, that writing to be 
good must be persuasive (since persuasion is the 
only true intellectual process), and will test this by 
a passage of Newman's I am presently to quote to 
you, from his famous "definition of a gentleman, " 
I think you will guess pretty accurately the 
general law of excellence I would have you, as 
Cambridge men, tribally and particularly obey. 

Newman says of a gentleman that among other 
things : 

He is never mean or little in his disputes, never 
takes unfair advantage, never mistakes personalities 
or sharp sayings for arguments, or insinuates evil 
which he dare not say out. ... If he engages in con- 
troversy of any kind, his disciplined intellect preserves 
him from the blundering discourtesy of better per- 
haps, but less educated minds; who, like blunt 
weapons, tear and hack instead of cutting clean, who 
mistake the point in argument, waste their strength on 
trifles, misconceive their adversary, and leave the 
question more involved than they found it. He may 
be right or wrong in his opinion: but he is too clear- 
sighted to be unjust. He is simple as he is forcible, 
and as brief as he is decisive. 

Enough for the moment on this subject: but 
commit these words to your hearts, and you will 
not only triumph in newspaper controversy. You 
will do better : you will avoid it. 



1 62 On the Art of Writing 

To proceed. — We found further that our writing 
should be accurate: because language expresses 
thought — is, indeed, the only expression of thought 
—and if we lack the skill to speak precisely, our 
thought will remain confused, ill-defined. The 
editor of a mining paper in Denver, U. S. A., boldly 
the other day laid down this law, that niceties of 
language were mere "frills"; all a man needed was 
to "get there," that is, to say what he wished in 
his own way. But just here, we found, lies the 
mischief. You will not get there by hammering 
away on your own untutored impulse. You must 
first be your own reader, chiselling out the thought 
definitely for yourself : and, after that, must carve 
out the intaglio yet more sharply and neatly, if 
you would impress its image accurately upon the 
wax of other men's minds. We found that even for 
Men of Science this neat clean carving of words 
was a very necessary accomplishment. As Sir 
James Barrie once observed, "The Man of Science 
appears to be the only man who has something to 
say, just now — and the only man who does not 
know how to say it." But the trouble by no 
means ends with science. Our poets — those gifted 
strangely preherisile men who, as I said in my first 
lecture, seem to be born with filaments by which 
they apprehend, and along which they conduct, the 



Some Principles Reaffirmed 163 

half-secrets of life to us ordinary mortals — our 
poets would appear to be scamping artistic labour, 
neglecting to reduce the vague impressions to the 
clearly cut image which is, after all, what helps. 
It may be a triumph that they have taught modern 
French poetry to be suggestive. I think it would 
be more profitable could they learn from France — 
that nation of fine workmen — to be definite. 

But about "getting there" — I ask you to re- 
member Wolfe, with the seal of his fate on him, 
stepping into his bateau on the dark St. Lawrence 
River and quoting as they tided him over: — 

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, 
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave, 

Await alike th' inevitable hour; 

The paths of glory lead but to the grave. 

"I had rather have written those lines," said 
Wolfe, "than conquer Canada. " That is how our 
forefathers valued noble writing. The Denver 
editor holds that you may write as you please so 
long as you get there. Well, Wolfe got there: and 
so, in Wolfe's opinion, did Gray: but perhaps to 
Wolfe and Gray, and to the Denver editor, "there " 
happened to mean two different places. Wolfe 
got to the Heights of Abraham. 

Further, it was against this loose adaptation of 



1 64 On the Art of Writing 

words to thought and to things that we protested 
in our interpolated lecture on Jargon, which is not 
so much bad writing as the avoidance of writing. 
The man who employs jargon does not get "there " 
at all, even in a raw rough pioneering fashion: he 
just walks around "there " in the ambient tracks of 
others. Let me fly as high as I can and quote you 
two recent achievements by Cabinet Ministers, as 
reported in the Press: — (i) "Mr. McKenna's 
reasons for releasing from Holloway Prison Miss 
Lenton while on remand charged in connexion with 
(sweet phrase!) the firing of the tea pavilion in 
Kew Gardens are given in a letter which he has 
caused to be forwarded to a correspondent who 
inquired as to the circumstances of the release. 
The letter says, ' I am desired by the Home Secre- 
tary to say that Lilian Lenton was reported by 
the medical officer at Holloway Prison to be in a 
state of collapse and in imminent danger of death 
consequent upon her refusal to take food. Three 
courses were open — (i) To leave her to die; (2) 
To attempt to feed her forcibly, which the medical 
officer advised would probably entail death in her 
existing condition : (3) To release her. The Home 
Secretary adopted the last course." 

"Would probably entail death in her exist- 
ing condition"! Will anyone tell me how Mr. 



Some Principles Reaffirmed 165 

McKenna or anyone else could kill, or (as he 
prefers to put it) entail death upon, Miss Lenton 
in a non-existing condition? 

(2) Next take the Chancellor of the Exchequer. 
As we know, the Chancellor of the Exchequer 
can use incisive speech when he chooses. On 
May 8th, as reported in next day's Morning Post, 
Mr. Lloyd George, answering a question, delivered 
himself of this to an attentive Senate: — 

With regard to Mr. Noel Buxton's questions, I can- 
not answer for an enquiry which is of a private and 
confidential character, for although I am associated 
with it I am not associated with it as a Minister of the 
Crown. . . . Those enquiries are of a very careful 
systematic and scientific character, and are being con- 
ducted by the ablest investigators in this country, 
some of whom have reputations of international char- 
acter. I am glad to think that the investigation is 
of a most impartial character. 

It must be a comforting thought, that an inquiry 
of a private and confidential character is also of 
a very systematic and scientific character, and 
besides being of a most impartial character, is 
conducted by men of international character — 
whatever that may happen to mean. What is an 
international character, and what would you give 
for one? 



166 On the Art of Writing 

We found that this way of talking, while pre- 
tending to be something pontifical, is really not 
prose at all, nor reputable speech at all, but 
jargon; nor is the offence to be excused by plead- 
ing, as I have heard it pleaded, that Mr. Lloyd 
George was riot using his own phraseology but 
quoting from a paper supplied him by some 
permanent official of the Treasury : since we select 
our civil servants among men of decent education 
and their salaries warrant our stipulating that 
they shall be able, at least, to speak and write 
their mother tongue. 

We laid down certain rules to help us in the 
way of straight Prose : — 

(i) Almost always prefer the concrete word to 
the abstract. 

(2) Almost always prefer the direct word to the 
circumlocution. 

(3) Generally use transitive verbs, that strike 
their object; and use them in the active voice, eschew- 
ing the stationary passive, with its little auxiliary its's 
and was's, and its participles getting into the light 
of your adjectives, which should be few. For, as a 
rough law, by his use of the straight verb and by his 
economy of adjectives you can tell a man's style, if it 
be masculine or neuter, writing or "composition." 

The authors of that capital handbook The 



Some Principles Reaffirmed 167 

King's English, which I have already recommended 
to you, add two rules: — 

(4) Prefer the short word to the long. 

(5) Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance. 
But these two precepts you would have to modify 
by so long a string of exceptions that I do not 
commend them to you. In fact I think them false 
in theory and likely to be fatal in practice. For, 
as my last lecture tried to show, you no sooner 
begin to philosophise things instead of merely tell- 
ing a tale of them than you must go to the Mediter- 
ranean languages : because in these man first learnt 
to discuss his "why" and "how," and these lan- 
guages yet guard the vocabulary. 

Lastly we saw how, by experimenting with 
rhythm, our prose "broke its birth's invidious 
bar" and learnt to scale the forbidden heights. 

Now by attending to the few plain rules given 
above you may train yourselves to write sound, 
straightforward, work-a-day English. But if you 
would write melodious English, I fear the gods 
will require of you what they ought to have given 
you at birth — something of an ear. Yet the most 
of us have ears, of sorts; and I believe that, 
though we can only acquire it by assiduous 
practice, the most of us can wonderfully improve 
our talent of the ear. 



168 On the Art of Writing 

If you will possess yourselves of a copy of 
Quintilian, or borrow one from any library (Bohn's 
translation will do) and turn to his 9th book, you 
will find a hundred ways indicated, illustrated, 
classified, in which a writer or speaker can vary 
his style, modulate it, lift or depress it, regulate its 
balance. 

All these rules, separately worth studying, if 
taken together may easily bewilder and dishearten 
you. Let me choose just two, and try to hearten 
you by showing that, even with these two only, you 
can go a long way. 

Take the use of right emphasis. What Quin- 
tilian says of right emphasis — or the most impor- 
tant thing he says — is this : — 

There is sometimes an extraordinary force in some 
particular word, which, if it be placed in no very 
conspicuous position in the middle part of a sentence, 
is likely to escape the attention of the hearer and to be 
obscured by the words surrounding it; but if it be 
put at the end of the sentence is urged upon the 
reader's sense and imprinted on his mind. 

That seems obvious enough, for English use as 
well as for Latin. ' ' The wages of sin is Death " — 
anyone can see how much more emphatic that is 
than "Death is the wages of sin." But let your 
minds work on this matter of emphasis, and dis- 



Some Principles Reaffirmed 169 

cover how emphasis has always its right point 
somewhere, though it be not at all necessarily at 
the end of the sentence. Take a sentence in which 
the strong words actually repeat themselves for 
emphasis : — 

Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city. 

Our first impulse would be to place the emphasis at 
the end : — 

Babylon, that great city, is fallen, is fallen. ' 
The Latin puts it at the beginning : — 

Cecidit, cecidit, Babylonia ilia magna. 
Fallen, fallen, is Babylon, that great city. 

The forty-seven preserved the "falling close" 
so exquisite in the Latin; the emphasis, already 
secured by repetition, they accentuated by length- 
ening the pause. I would urge on you that in 
every sentence there is just a right point of empha- 
sis which you must train your ears to detect. So 
your writing will acquire not only emphasis, but 
balance, and you will instinctively avoid such an 
ill-emphasised sentence as this, which, not naming 
the author, I will quote for your delectation: — 

"Are Japanese Aprils always as lovely as this?" 
asked the man in the light tweed suit of two others in 



170 On the Art of Writing 

immaculate flannels with crimson sashes round their 
waists and puggarees folded in cunning plaits round 
their broad Terai hats. 

Explore, next, what (though critics have strange- 
ly neglected it) to my mind stands the first, or 
almost the first, secret of beautiful writing in 
English, whether in prose or in verse; I mean that 
inter-play of vowel-sounds in which no language 
can match us. We have so many vowel sounds 
indeed, and so few vowels to express them, that 
the foreigner, mistaking our modesty, complains 
against God's plenty. We alone, for example, 
sound by a natural vowel that noble 7, which 
other nations can only compass by diphthongs. 
Let us consider that vowel for a moment or two 
and mark how it leads off the dance of the Graces, 
its sisters: — 

Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of 
the Lord is risen upon thee. 

Mark how expressively it drops to the solemn 
vowel "O, " and anon how expressively it reasserts 
itself to express rearisen delight : — 

Arise, shine, for thy light is come, and the glory of 
the Lord is risen upon thee. For behold the darkness 
shall cover the earth, and gross darkness the people: 
but the Lord shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall 



Some Principles Reaffirmed 171 

be seen upon thee. And the Gentiles shall come to 
thy light, and Kings to the brightness of thy rising. 

Take another passage in which the first lift of 
this / vowel yields to its graver sisters as though 
the sound sank into the very heart of the sense. 

I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto 
him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and 
before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy 
son." 

"And am no more worthy to be called thy son. " 
Mark the deep O's. "For this my son was dead 
and is alive again; he was lost and is found." 
"O my son, my son Absalom" — observe the I and 

how they interchime, until the O of sorrow tolls 
the lighter note down : — 

O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! 
Would God I had died for thee, Absalom, my son, 
my son! 

Or take this lyric, by admission one of the 
loveliest written in this present age, and mark 
here too how the vowels play and ring and chime 
and toll. 

1 will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, 

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles 
made: 



172 On the Art of Writing 

Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey 
bee, 
And live alone in a bee-loud glade. 1 

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes 
dropping slow, 
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the 
cricket sings; 
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple 
glow, 
And evening full of the linnet's wings. 
I will arise and go now, for always night and day 
I hear lake-water lapping, and low sounds by the 
shore ; 
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavement grey, 
I hear it in the deep heart's core. 

I think if you will but open your ears to this 
beautiful vowel-play which runs through all the 
best of our prose and poetry, whether you ever 
learn to master it or not, you will have acquired 
a new delight, and one various enough to last you 
though you live to a very old age. 

All this of which I am speaking is Art: and 
Literature being an Art, do you not see how per- 
sonal a thing it is — how it cannot escape being 

*IEO:IOE 

10 :EOUA 

"As mwsing slow i" hail 
Thy genial loved retwrn." 

Collins, Ode to Evening. 



Some Principles Reaffirmed 173 

personal? No two men (unless they talk jargon) 
say the same thing in the same way. As is a man's 
imagination, as is his character, as is the harmony 
in himself, as is his ear, as is his skill, so and not 
otherwise he will speak, so and not otherwise than 
they can respond to that imagination, that char- 
acter, that order of his intellect, that harmony of 
his soul, his hearers will hear him. Let me con- 
clude with this great passage from Newman which 
I beg you, having heard it, to ponder: — 

If then the power of speech is as great as any that 
can be named, — if the origin of language is by many 
philosophers considered nothing short of divine — if by 
means of words the secrets of the heart are brought to 
light, pain of soul is relieved, hidden grief is carried 
off, sympathy conveyed, experience recorded, and wis- 
dom perpetuated, — if by great authors the many are 
drawn up into unity, national character is fixed, a 
people speaks, the past and the future, the East and 
the West are brought into communication with each 
other, — if such men are, in a word, the spokesmen 
and prophets of the human family — it will not answer 
to make light of Literature or to neglect its study: 
rather we may be sure that, in proportion as we mas- 
ter it in whatever language, and imbibe its spirit, we 
shall ourselves become in our own measure the min- 
isters of like benefits to others — be they many or few, 
be they in the obscurer or the more distinguished 
walks of life — who are united to us by social ties, 
and are within the sphere of our personal influence. 



174 On the Art of Writing 

Note on page 154. 

I append the following specimen translations of the 
famous passage in St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corin- 
thians xv. 51 sqq. I choose this because (1) it is an 
important passage; (2) it touches a high moment of 
philosophising; (3) the comparison seems to me to 
represent with' great fairness to Tyndale the extent 
of the forty-seven's debt to him; (4) it shows that 
they meant exactly what they said in their Preface; 
and (5) it illustrates, towards the close, their genius 
for improvement . The Greek runs : — 

'IBou jukjti/ pcov ujitv Xsyo)' Uavzeq pisv ou Kot^Y]0Y)ad^eOa* 
xavTeq Zk aXXayiQtJopLeSa, Iv axo^w, ev pn:rj (fyQaX^ou, Iv zy 
ea^aTjy aaXxtYyf araXrtCcret yap, kz\ ol ve/cpot lyepO^ffovxac 
acpGapToc, km fads aXXayiqao^eGa. Set yap to cpGapTbv 
touto IvBuaaaGat acpGapafav, ical to Gvtqtov touto IvBucaaGai 
aGavaatav. otccv hk to 90apTov touto IvBucnjTac dcpGapafav, 
Kal to 0vy)tov touto IvBuoiQTat dGavacfav, t6ts YeviJasTai 6 
Xoyoq 6 YeypapipLevoc;, " KaTexoG-q 6 GdvaTo? etc; vl/coq." 
"IIou aou, GdvaTe, to KSVTpov; xou aou, acBrj, to vcko<;;" 

Wyclif translates: — 

Lo, I seie to you pryvyte of holi thingis | and alle we 
schulen rise agen | but not alle we schuln be chaungid | 
in a moment in the twynkelynge of an ye, in the last 
trumpe [ for the trumpe schal sowne: and deed men 
schulen rise agen with out corrupcion, and we schuln 
be changid | for it bihoveth this corruptible thing to 
clothe uncorrupcion and this deedly thing to putte 
aweye undeedlynesse. But whanne this deedli thing 



Some Principles Reaffirmed 175 

schal clothe undeedlynesse | thanne schal the word be 
don that is written | deeth is sopun up in victorie | 
deeth, where is thi victorie? deeth, where is thi pricke? 

Tyndale:— 

Beholde I shewe you a mystery. We shall not all 
slepe: but we shall all be chaunged | and that in a 
moment | and in the twinclinge of an eye | at the sounde 
of the last trompe. For the trompe shall blowe, and 
the deed shall ryse incorruptible and we shalbe 
chaunged. For this corruptible must put on incor- 
ruptibilite: and this mortall must put on immortalite. 
When this corruptible hath put on incorruptibilite | 
and this mortall hath put on immortalite: then 
shalbe brought to pass the saying that is written. 
"Deeth is consumed in to victory." Deeth, where is 
thy stynge? Hell, where is thy victory? 

The Authorised Version : — 

Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all 
sleepe, but wee shall all be changed, in a moment, in 
the twinckling of an eye, at the last trumpe, (for the 
trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised 
incorruptible, and we shall be changed). For this 
corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortall 
must put on immortalitie. So when this corruptible 
shall have put on incorruption and this mortall shall 
have put on immortality, then shall be brought to 
passe the saying that is written, " Death is swallowed 
up in victory." O Death, where is thy sting? 
grave, where is thy victory? 



VIII 

On the Lineage of English Literature (i) 

You may think it strange, Gentlemen, that out 
of a course of ten lectures which aim to treat 
English Literature as an affair of practice, I should 
propose to spend two in discussing our literary 
lineage: a man's lineage and geniture being reck- 
oned, as a rule, among the things he cannot be 
reasonably asked to amend. But since of high 
breeding is begotten (as most of us believe) a 
disposition to high thoughts, high deeds; since 
to have it and be modestly conscious of it is to 
carry within us a faithful monitor persuading us to 
whatsoever in conduct is gentle, honourable, of 
good repute, and so silently dissuading us from base 
thoughts, low ends, ignoble gains; seeing, more- 
over, that a man will often do more to match his 
father's virtue than he would to improve himself; 
I shall endeavour, in this and my next lecture, to 
scour that spur of ancestry and present it to you as 
so bright and sharp an incentive that you, who 

176 



Lineage of English Literature 177 

read English Literature and practise writing 
here in Cambridge, shall not pass out from her 
insensible of the dignity of your studies, or without 
pride or remorse according, as you have inter- 
preted in practice the motto, Noblesse oblige. 

Tis wisdom, and that high, 
For men to use their fortune reverently 
Even in youth. 

Let me add that, just as a knowledge of his 
family failings will help one man in economising 
his estate, or warn another to shun for his health 
the pleasures of the table, so some knowledge of 
our lineage in letters may put us, as Englishmen, 
on the watch for certain national defects (for such 
we have), on our guard against certain sins which 
too easily beset us. Nay, this watchfulness may 
well reach down from matters of great moment to 
seeming trifles. It is good for us to recognise 
with Wordsworth that 

We must be free or die, who speak the tongue 

That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold 

Which Milton held. In everything we are sprung 
Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold. 

But, though less important, it is good also to 
recognise that, as sons of Cambridge, we equally 



178 On the Art of Writing 

offend against her breeding when in our scientific 
writings we allow ourselves to talk of a microbe as 
an "antibody." 

Now, because a great deal of what I have to say 
this morning, if not heretical, will yet run contrary 
to the vogue and practice of the Schools for these 
thirty years, I will take the leap into my subject 
over a greater man's back and ask you to listen with 
particular attention to the following long passage 
from a writer whose opinion you may challenge, but 
whose authority to speak as a master of English 
prose no one in this room will deny. 

When (says Cardinal Newman) we survey the stream 
of human affairs for the last three thousand years, we 
find it to run thus: — At first sight there is so much 
fluctuation, agitation, ebbing and flowing, that we 
may despair to discern any law in its movements, tak- 
ing the earth as its bed and mankind as its contents ; 
but on looking more closely and attentively we shall 
discern, in spite of the heterogeneous materials and 
the various histories and fortunes which are found in 
the race of man during the long period I have men- 
tioned, a certain formation amid the chaos — one and 
one only, — and extending, though not over the whole 
earth, yet through a very considerable portion of it. 
Man is a social being and can hardly exist without 
society, and in matter of fact societies have ever 
existed all over the habitable earth. The greater 
part of these associations have been political or re- 
ligious, and have been comparatively limited in extent 



Lineage of English Literature 179 

and temporary. They have been formed and dis- 
solved by the force of accidents, or by inevitable 
circumstances; and when we have enumerated them 
one by one we have made of them all that can be made. 
But there is one remarkable association which attracts 
the attention of the philosopher, not political nor 
religious — or at least only partially and not essentially 
such — which began in the earliest times and grew with 
each succeeding age till it reached its complete de- 
velopment, and then continued on, vigorous and un- 
wearied, and still remains as definite and as firm as ever 
it was. Its bond is a common civilisation: and though 
there are other civilisations in the world, as there are 
other societies, yet this civilisation, together with the 
society which is its creation and its home, is so distinc- 
tive and luminous in its character, so imperial in its 
extent, so imposing in its duration, and so utterly 
without rival on the face of the earth, that the associa- 
tion may fitly assume to itself the title of "Hu- 
man Society, " and its civilisation the abstract term 
"Civilisation." 

There are indeed great outlying portions of man- 
kind which are not, perhaps never have been, included 
in this Human Society ; still they are outlying portions 
and nothing else, fragmentary, unsociable, solitary 
and unmeaning, protesting and revolting against the 
grand central formation of which I am speaking, but 
not uniting with each other into a second whole. I am 
not denying, of course, the civilisation of the Chinese, 
for instance, though it be not our civilisation ; but it is 
a huge, stationary, unattractive, morose civilisation. 
Nor do I deny a civilisation to the Hindoos, nor to 
the ancient Mexicans, nor to the Saracens, nor (in a 
certain sense) to the Turks ; but each of these races has 



180 On the Art of Writing 

its own civilisation, as separate from one another 
as from ours. 

I do not see how they can be alfbrought under one 
idea. . . . 

Gentlemen, let me here observe that I am not 
entering upon the question of races, or upon their 
history. I have nothing to do with ethnology, I 
take things as I find them on the surface of history 
and am but classifying phenomena. Looking, then, 
at the countries which surround the Mediterranean 
Sea as a whole, I see them to be from time immemorial, 
the seat of an association of intellect and mind 
such as to deserve to be called the Intellect and the 
Mind of the Human Kind. Starting as it does, and 
advancing from certain centres, till their respective 
influences intersect and conflict, and then at length 
intermingle and combine, a common Thought has 
been generated, and a common Civilisation defined 
and established. Egypt is one such starting point, 
Syria another, Greece a third, Italy a fourth and 
North Africa a fifth — afterwards France and Spain. 
As time goes on, and as colonisation and conquest 
work their changes, we see a great association of 
nations formed, of which the Roman Empire is the 
maturity and the most intelligible expression: an 
association, however, not political but mental, based 
on the same intellectual ideas and advancing by com- 
mon intellectual methods. ... In its earliest age 
it included far more of the Eastern world than it has 
since; in these later times it has taken into its com- 
pass a new hemisphere; in the Middle Ages it lost 
Africa, Egypt and Syria, and extended itself to Ger- 
many, Scandinavia and the British Isles. At one time 
its territory was flooded by strange and barbarous 



Lineage of English Literature 181 

races, but the existing civilisation was vigorous enough 
to vivify what threatened to stifle it, and to assimilate 
to the old social forms what came to expel them : and 
thus the civilisation of modern times remains what it 
was of old; not Chinese, or Hindoo, or Mexican, or 
Saracen . . . but the lineal descendant, or rather the 
continuation — mutatis mutandis — of the civilisation 
which began in Palestine and Greece. 

To omit, then, all minor debts such as what of 
arithmetic, what of astronomy, what of geography, 
we owe to the Saracen, from Palestine we derive 
the faith of Europe shared (in the language of the 
Bidding Prayer) by all Christian people dispersed 
throughout the world; as to Greece we owe the 
rudiments of our Western art, philosophy, letters ; 
and not only the rudiments but the continuing 
inspiration, so that — though entirely superseded in 
worship, as even in the Athens of Pericles they 
were worshipped only by an easy, urbane, more 
than half humorous tolerance — Apollo and the 
Muses, Zeus and the great ones of Olympus, 
Hermes and Hephaestus, Athene in her armour, 
with her vanquisher the foam-born irresistible 
Aphrodite, these remain the authentic gods of our 
literature, beside whom the gods of northern 
Europe — Odin, Thor, Freya — are strangers, un- 
homely, uncanny as the shadows of unfamiliar 
furniture on the walls of an inn. Sprung though 



1 82 On the Art of Writing 

great numbers of us are from the loins of North- 
men, it is in these gracious deities of the South 
that we find the familiar and the real, as from the 
heroes of the sister-island, Cucullain andConco- 
bar, we turn to Hercules, to Perseus, to Bellero- 
phon, even to actual men of history, saying, "Give 
us Leonidas, give us Horatius, give us Regulus. 
These are the mighty ones we understand, and 
from whom, in a direct line of tradition, we under- 
stand Harry of Agincourt, Philip Sidney and our 
Nelson." 

Now since, of the Mediterranean peoples, the 
Hebrews discovered the Unseen God whom the 
body of Western civilisation has learnt to worship ; 
since the Greeks invented art, philosophy, letters; 
since Rome found and developed the idea of 
imperial government, of imperial colonies as super- 
seding merely fissiparous ones, of settling where 
she conquered (ubi Romanus vicit ibi habitat) and 
so extending with Government that system of law 
which Europe still obeys; we cannot be surprised 
that Israel, Greece, Rome — each in turn — set 
store on a pure ancestry. Though Christ be the 
veritable Son of God, his ancestry must be traced 
back through his supposed father Joseph to the 
stem of Jesse, and so to Abraham, father of the 
race. Again, as jealously as the Evangelist claimed 



Lineage of English Literature 183 

Jesus for a Hebrew of the Hebrews, so, if you 
will turn to the Menexenus of Plato in the Oration 
of Aspasia over the dead who perished in battle, 
you hear her claim that "No Pelopes nor Cad- 
mians, nor Egyptians, nor Dauni, nor the rest 
of the crowd of born foreigners dwell with us ; but 
ours is the land of pure Hellenes, free from admix- 
ture. " These proud Athenians, as you know, 
wore brooches in the shape of golden grasshoppers, 
to signify that they were afafyGove?, children of 
Attica, sprung direct from her soil. And so, 
again, the true Roman, while enlarging Rome's 
citizenship over Asia, Africa, Gaul, to our remote 
Britain, insisted, even in days of the later Empire, 
on his pure descent from ^Eneas and Romulus — 

Unde Ramnes et Quirites proque prole posterum 
Romuli matrem crearet et nepotem Caesarem. 

With the Ramnes, Quirites, together ancestrally proud 

as they drew 
From Romulus down to our Caesar — last, best of that 

blood, of that thew. 

Here is a boast that we English must be con- 
tent to forgo. We may wear a rose on St. George's 
day, if we are clever enough to grow one. The 
Welsh, I dare say, have less difficulty with the 
leek. But April the 23rd is not a time of roses 



1 84 On the Art of Writing 

that we can pluck them as we pass, nor can we 
claim St. George as a compatriot — Cappadocius 
nostras. We have, to be sure, a few legendary- 
heroes, of whom King Arthur and Robin Hood are 
(I suppose) the greatest; but, save in some Celtic 
corners of the land, we have few fairies, and these 
no great matter; while, as for tutelary gods, our 
springs, our wells, our groves, cliffs, mountain- 
sides, either never possessed them or possess them 
no longer. Not of our landscape did it happen 
that 

The lonely mountains o'er, 

And the resounding shore, 
A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament ; 

From haunted spring, and dale 

Edg'd with poplar pale, 
The parting Genius is with sighing sent. 

— for the sufficient reason that no tutelary gods of 
importance were ever here to be dispersed. 

Let me press this home upon you by an illus- 
tration which I choose with the double purpose of 
enforcing my argument and sending you to make 
acquaintance (if you have not already made it) 
with one of the loveliest poems written in our time. 

In one of Pliny's letters you will find a very 
pleasant description of the source of the Clitum- 
nus, a small Umbrian river which, springing from a 



Lineage of English Literature 185 

rock in a grove of cypresses, descends into the 
Tinia, a tributary of the Tiber. "Have you 
ever," writes Pliny to his friend Romanus — 

Have you ever seen the source of the Clitumnus? 
I suppose not, as I never heard you mention it. Let 
me advise you to go there at once. I have just visited 
it and am sorry that I put off my visit so long. At 
the foot of a little hill, covered with old and shady 
cypress trees, a spring gushes and bursts into a num- 
ber of streamlets of various size. Breaking, so to 
speak, forth from its imprisonment, it expands into a 
broad basin, so clear and transparent that you may 
count the pebbles and little pieces of money which are 
thrown into it. From this point the force and weight 
of the water, rather than the slope of the ground, 
hurry it onward. What was a mere spring becomes a 
noble river, broad enough to allow vessels to pass each 
other as they sail with or against the stream. The 
current is so strong, though the ground is level, that 
barges of beam, as they go down, require no assistance 
of oars; while to go up is as much as can be done 
with oars and long poles. . . . The banks are clothed 
with abundant ash and poplar, so distinctly reflected 
in the transparent waters that they seem to be growing 
at the bottom of the river and can be counted with 
ease. The water is as cold as snow and as pure in 
colour. Hard by the spring stands an ancient and 
venerable temple with a statue of the river-god 
Clitumnus, clothed in the customary robe of state. 
The Oracles here delivered attest the presence of the 
deity. Close in the precinct stand several little 
chapels dedicated to particular gods, each of whom 



186 On the Art of Writing 

owns his distinctive name and special worship, and 
is the tutelary deity of a runlet. For beside the 
principal spring, which is, as it were, the parent of all 
the rest, there are several smaller ones which have 
their distinct sources but unite their waters with the 
Clitumnus, over which a bridge is thrown, separating 
the sacred part of the river from that which is open to 
general use. Above the bridge you may only go in a 
boat ; below it, you may swim. The people of the town 
of Hispallum, to whom Augustus gave this place, 
furnish baths and lodgings at the public expense. 
There are several small dwelling-houses on the banks, 
in specially picturesque situations, and they stand 
quite close to the waterside. In short, everything 
in the neighbourhood will give you pleasure. You 
may also amuse yourself with numberless inscriptions 
on the pillars and walls, celebrating the praises of the 
stream and of its tutelary god. Many of these you 
will admire, and some will make you laugh. But no! 
You are too well cultivated to laugh at such things. 
Farewell. 

Clitumnus still gushes from its rock among the 
cypresses, as in Pliny's day. The god has gone 
from his temple, on the frieze of which you may 
read this later inscription — "Deus Angelorum, qui 
fecit Resurrectionem." After many centuries and 
almost in our day, by the brain of Cavour and 
the sword of Garibaldi, he has made a resur- 
rection for Italy. As part of that resurrection 
(for no nation can live and be great without 



Lineage of English Literature 187 

its poet) was born a true poet, Carducci. He 
visited the bountiful, everlasting source, and of 
what did he sing? Possess yourselves, as for a 
shilling you may, of his Ode Allefonte del Clitumno, 
and read: for few nobler poems have adorned our 
time. He sang of the weeping willow, the ilex, 
ivy, cypress and the presence of the god still 
immanent among them. He sang of Umbria, of 
the ensigns of Rome, of Hannibal swooping down 
over the Alps; he sang of the nuptials of Janus 
and Comesena, progenitors of the Italian people; 
of nymphs, naiads, and the moonlight dances 
of Oreads ; of flocks descending to the river at dusk, 
of the homestead, the barefooted mother, the 
clinging child, the father, clad in goat-skins, guid- 
ing the ox- waggon; and he ends on the very note 
of Virgil's famous apostrophe 

Sed neque Medorum silvae, ditissima terra . . . 

with an invocation of Italy — Italy, mother of 
bullocks for agriculture, of wild colts for battle, 
mother of corn and of the vine, Roman mother of 
enduring laws and mediaeval mother of illustrious 
arts. The mountains, woods and waters of green 
Umbria applaud the song, and across their applause 
is heard the whistle of the railway train bearing 
promise of new industries and a new national life. 



188 On the Art of Writing 

E tu, pia madre di giovenchi invitti 
a franger glebe e rintegrar maggesi 
e d' annitrenti in guerra aspri polledri, 
Italia madre, 

madre di biade e viti e leggi eterne 
ed incliti arti a raddolcir la vita 
salve! a te i canti de 1' antica lode 
io rinovello. 

Plaudono i monti al carme e i boschi e 1' acque 
de 1' Umbria verde: in faccia a noi fumando 
ed anelando nuove Industrie in corsa 
fischia il vapore. 

And thou, O pious mother of unvanquished 
Bullocks to break glebe, to restore the fallow, 
And of fierce colts for neighing in the battle : 
Italy, mother, 

Mother of corn and vines and of eternal 
Laws and illustrious arts the life to sweeten, 
Hail, hail, all hail! The song of ancient praises 
Renew I to thee ! 

The mountains, woods and waters of green Umbria 
Applaud the song: and here before us fuming 
And longing for new industries, a-racing 
Whistles the white steam. 1 

I put it to you, Gentlemen, that, worthy as are the 
glories of England to be sung, this note of Carduc- 

J I quote from a translation by Mr. E. J. Watson, recently 
published by Messrs. J. W. Arrowsmith, of Bristol. 



Lineage of English Literature 189 

ci's we cannot decently or honestly strike. Great 
lives have been bled away into Tweed and Avon: 
great spirits have been oared down the Thames to 
Traitor's Gate and the Tower. Deeds done on 
the Cam have found their way into history. But 
I once traced the Avon to its source under Naseby 
battlefield, and found it issuing from the fragments 
of a stucco swan. No god mounts guard over the 
head- water of Thames; and the only Englishman 
who boldly claims a divine descent is (I under- 
stand) an impostor who runs an Agapemone. In 
short we are a mixed race, and our literature is 
derivative. Let us confine our pride to those 
virtues, not few, which are honestly ours. A 
Roman noble, even to-day, has some excuse for 
reckoning a god in his ancestry, or at least a wolf 
among its wet-nurses : but of us English even those 
who came over with William the Norman have 
the son of a tanner's daughter for escort. I very 
well remember that, the other day, writers who 
vindicated our hereditary House of Lords against a 
certain Parliament Act commonly did so on the 
ground that since the Reform Bill of 1832, by 
inclusion of all that was eminent in politics, war 
and commerce, the Peerage had been so changed 
as to know itself no longer for the same thing. 
That is our practical way. 



190 On the Art of Writing 

At all events, the men who made our literature 
had never a doubt, as they were careless to dis- 
simulate, that they were conquering our tongue to 
bring it into the great European comity, the civili- 
sation of Greece and Rome. An Elizabethan 
writer, for example, would begin almost as with a 
formula by begging to be forgiven that he has 
sought to render the divine accent of Plato, the 
sugared music of Ovid, into our uncouth and 
barbarous tongue. There may have been some 
mock-modesty in this, but it rested on a base of 
belief. Much of the glory of English Literature 
was achieved by men who, with the splendour of 
the Renaissance in their eyes, supposed them- 
selves to be working all the while upon pale and 
borrowed shadows. 

Let us pass the enthusiasms of days when 
"bliss was it in that dawn to be alive' ' and come 
down to Alexander Pope and the Age of Reason. 
Pope at one time proposed to write a History of 
English Poetry, and the draft scheme of that 
History has been preserved. How does it begin? 
Whv thus : — 



Lineage of English Literature 191 



Era I. 



I. School of Provence 



2. School of Chaucer 



3. School of Petrarch 



4. School of Dante 



Chaucer's Visions, Ro- 

maunt of the Rose. 
Piers Plowman. Tales 

from Boccace. Gower. 
Lydgate. 
T. Occleve. 

Walt, de Mapes (a bad 
error, that!). 
_ Skelton. 
f E. of Surrey. 
I Sir Thomas Wyatt. 
• Sir Philip Sidney. 
t G. Gascoyn. 
Lord Buckhurst's Induc- 
tion. Gorboduc. 
Original of Good Tragedy. 
Seneca his model. 



— and so on. The scheme after Pope's death 
came into the hands of Gray, who for a time was 
fired with the notion of writing the History in 
collaboration with his friend Mason. Knowing 
Gray's congenital self-distrust, you will not be 
surprised that in the end he declined the task 
and handed it over to Warton. But, says Mant 
in his Life of Warton, "their design" — that is, 
Gray's design with Mason — "was to introduce 
specimens of the Provencal poetry, and of the 
Scaldic, British, and Saxon, as preliminary to what 



192 On the Art of Writing 

first deserved to be called English poetry, about 
the time of Chaucer, from whence their history 
properly so called was to commence." A letter 
of Gray's on the whole subject, addressed to 
Warton, is extant, and you may read it in Dr. 
Courthope's History of English Poetry. 

Few in this room are old enough to remember 
the shock of awed surmise which fell upon young 
minds presented, in the late 'seventies or early 
'eighties of the last century, with Freeman's 
Norman Conquest or Green's Short History of the 
English People; in which as through parting 
clouds of darkness, we beheld our ancestry, literary 
as well as political, radiantly legitimised; though 
not, to be sure, in the England that we knew — but 
far away in Sleswick, happy Sleswick! "Its 
pleasant pastures, its black-timbered homesteads, 
its prim little townships looking down on inlets 
of purple water, were then but a wild waste of 
heather and sand, girt along the coast with sunless 
woodland, broken here and there with meadows 
which crept down to the marshes and to the sea. " 
But what of that? There — surely there, in Sles- 
wick — had been discovered for us our august 
mother's marriage lines; and if the most of that 
bright assurance came out of an old political skit, 
the Germania of Tacitus, who recked at the time? 



Lineage of English Literature 193 

For along followed Mr. Stopford Brooke with an 
admirable little Primer published at one shilling, 
to instruct the meanest of us in our common 
father's actual name — Beowulf. 

Beowulf is an old English Epic. . . . There is not 
one word about our England in the poem. . . . The 
whole poem, pagan as it is, is English to the very- 
root. It is sacred to us; our Genesis, the book of our 
origins. 

Now I am not only incompetent to discuss with 
you the more recondite beauties of Beowulf but 
providentially forbidden the attempt by the con- 
ditions laid down for this chair. I gather — and 
my own perusal of the poem and of much writing 
about it confirms the belief — that it has been 
largely over-praised by some critics, who have 
thus naturally provoked others to underrate it. 
Such things happen. I note, but without sub- 
scribing to it, the opinion of Vigfusson and York 
Powell, the learned editors of the Corpus Poeticum 
Boreale, that in the Beowulf we have "an epic 
completely metamorphosed in form, blown out 
with long-winded empty repetitions and com- 
ments by a book poet, so that one must be careful 
not to take it as a type of the old poetry, " and I 
seem to hear as from the grave the very voice of 
my old friend the younger editor in that unfalter- 
13 



194 On the Art of Writing 

ing pronouncement. But on the whole I rather 
incline to accept the cautious surmise of Professor 
W. P. Ker that "a reasonable view of the merit of 
Beowulf is not impossible, though rash enthusiasm 
may have made too much of it ; while a correct and 
sober taste may have too contemptuously refused 
to attend to Grendel and the Firedrake, " and to 
leave it at that. I speak very cautiously because 
the manner of the late Professor Freeman, in 
especial, had a knack of provoking in gentle breasts 
a resentment which the mind in its frailty too easily 
converted to a prejudice against his matter: while 
to men trained to admire Thucydides and Tacitus 
and acquainted with Lucian's "Way to Write 
History" (Ilwq 8sf taiopiav auyypdcpeiv) his loud in- 
sistence that the art was not an art but a science, 
and moreover recently invented by Bishop Stubbs, 
was a perpetual irritant. 

But to return to Beowulf — You have just heard 
the opinions of scholars whose names you must 
respect. I, who construe Anglo-Saxon with diffi- 
culty, must admit the poem to contain many fine, 
even noble, passages. Take for example Hrothgar's 
lament for ^Eschere : — 

Hro^gar mafelode, helm Scyldinga: 
"Ne frin J>u aefter sselum; sorh is geniwod 



Lineage of English Literature 195 

Denigea leodum; dead is ^Eschere, 
Yrmenlafes yldra brofor, 
Min run-wita, ond min rsed-bora; 
Eaxl-gestealla, #bnne we on orlege 
Hafelan weredon, )?onne hniton fe]>an,l 
Eoferas cnysedan: swylc scolde eorl wesan 
Mpeling ser-god, swylc iEschere waes. 1 " 

This is simple, manly, dignified. It avoids the 
besetting sin of the Anglo-Saxon gleeman — the 
pretentious trick of calling things "out of their 
right names" for the sake of literary effect (as if 
e.g. the sea could be improved by being phrased 
into "the seals' domain"). Its Anglo-Saxdn 
staccato, so tiresome in sustained narrative, here 
happens to suit the broken utterance of mourning. 
In short, it exhibits the Anglo-Saxon Muse at her 
best, not at her customary. But set beside it a 
passage in which Homer tells of a fallen warrior — 
at haphazard, as it were, a single corpse chosen 
from the press of battle — 

xoXXa Be ^eppidBta ^eYaX' daxfBaq laru^lXiljav 
piapva^evwv &\up' auT<5v* 6 8* ev Gxpoyakiyfi kovcy)<; 
ksIto piyaq (ASYaXaxjTC, XeXaa^ivos cxxoauvawv. 

1 "Hrothgar spake, helm of the Scyldings: Ask not after 
good tidings. Sorrow is renewed among the Dane-folk. Dead 
is -^Eschere, Yrmenlaf 's elder brother, who read me rune and bore 
me rede; comrade at shoulder when we fended our heads in 
war and the boar-helms rang. Even so should we each be an 
atheling passing good, as ^Eschere was. " 



196 On the Art of Writing 

Can you — can anyone — compare the two pas- 
sages and miss to see that they belong to two 
different kingdoms of poetry ? I lay no stress here 
on "architectonics." I waive that the Iliad is a 
well-knit epic and the story of Beowulf a shapeless 
monstrosity. I ask you but to note the difference 
of note, of accent, of mere music. And I have 
quoted you but a passage of the habitual Homer. 
To assure yourselves that he can rise even from 
this habitual height to express the extreme of 
majesty and of human anguish in poetry which 
betrays no false note, no strain upon the store of 
emotion man may own with self-respect and exhibit 
without derogation of dignity, turn to the last 
book of the Iliad and read of Priam raising to his 
lips the hand that has murdered his son. I say 
confidently that no one unable to distinguish this, 
as poetry, from the very best of Beowulf is fit 
to engage upon business as a literary critic. 

In Beowulf then, as an imported poem, let us 
allow much barbarian merit. It came of dubious 
ancestry, and it had no progeny. The pretence 
that our glorious literature derives its lineage 
from Beowulf is in vulgar phrase "a put up job"; 
a falsehood grafted upon our text-books by Teu- 
tonic and Teutonising professors who can bring 
less evidence for it than will cover a threepenny- 



Lineage of English Literature 197 

piece. Its run for something like that money, in 
small educational manuals, has been in its way a 
triumph of pedagogic reclame. 

Our rude forefathers — the author of The Rape 
of the Lock and of the Elegy written in a Country 
Churchyard — knew nothing of the Exeter and Ver- 
celli Books, nothing of the Ruthwell Cross. But 
they were poets, practitioners of our literature in 
the true line of descent, and they knew certain 
things which all such artists know by instinct. 
So, before our historians of thirty-odd years ago 
started to make Chaucer and Beowulf one, these 
rude forefathers made them two. "Nor am I 
confident they erred." Rather I am confident, 
and hope in succeeding lectures to convince you, 
that, venerable as Anglo-Saxon is, and worthy to 
be studied as the mother of our vernacular speech 
(as for a dozen other reasons which my friend 
Professor Chadwick will give you), its value is 
historical rather than literary, since from it our 
Literature is not descended. Let me repeat 
it in words that admit of no misunderstanding — 
From Anglo-Saxon Prose, from Anglo-Saxon Poetry 
our living Prose and Poetry have, save linguistically, 
no derivation. I shall attempt to demonstrate 
that, whether or not Anglo-Saxon literature, such 
as it was, died of inherent weakness, die it did, and 



198 On the Art of Writing 

of its collapse the Vision of Piers Plowman may be 
regarded as the last dying spasm. I shall attempt 
to convince you that Chaucer did not inherit any 
secret from Csedmon or Cynewulf, but deserves 
his old title, "Father of English Poetry," because 
through Dante, through Boccaccio, through the 
lays and songs of Provence, he explored back to 
the Mediterranean, and opened for Englishmen a 
commerce in the true intellectual mart of Europe. 
I shall attempt to heap proof on you that what- 
ever the agency — whether through Wyat or Spen- 
ser, Marlowe or Shakespeare, or Donne, or Milton, 
or Dryden, or Pope, or Johnson, or even Words- 
worth — always our literature has obeyed, how- 
ever unconsciously, the precept Antiquam exquirite 
matrern, "Seek back to the ancient mother"; 
always it has recreated itself, has kept itself pure 
and strong, by harking back to bathe in those 
native — yes, native — Mediterranean springs. 



Do not presume me to be right in this. Rather, 
if you will, presume me to be wrong until the 
evidence is laid out for your judgment. But at 
least understand to-day how profoundly a man, 
holding that view, must deplore the whole course 
of academical literary study during these thirty 



Lineage of English Literature 199 

years or so, and how distrust what he holds to 
be its basal fallacies. 

For, literature being written in language, yet 
being something quite distinct, and the develop- 
ment of our language having been fairly continuous, 
while the literature of our nation exhibits a false 
start — a break, silence, repentance, then a renewal 
on right glorious lines — our students of literature 
have been drilled to follow the specious continu- 
ance while ignoring the actual break, and so to 
commit the one most fatal error in any study; 
that of mistaking the inessential for the essential. 

As I tried to persuade you in my Inaugural 
Lecture, our first duty to Literature is to study it 
absolutely, to understand, in Aristotelian phrase, 
its ih t£ rjv etvac; what it is and what it means. 
If that be our quest, and the height of it be realised, 
it is nothing to us — or almost nothing — to know 
of a certain alleged poet of the fifteenth century, 
that he helped us over a local or temporary 
disturbance in our vowel-endings. It is every- 
thing to have acquired and to possess such a norm 
of Poetry within us that we know whether or not 
what he wrote was Poetry. 

Do not think this is easy. The study of right 
literary criticism is much more difficult than the 



200 On the Art of Writing 

false path usually trodden; so difficult, indeed, 
that you may easily count the men who have 
attempted to grasp the great rules and apply 
them to writing as an art to be practised. But 
the names include some very great ones — Aristotle, 
Horace, Quintilian, Corneille, Boileau, Dryden, 
Johnson, Lessing, Coleridge, Goethe, Sainte- 
Beuve, Arnold: and the study, though it may not 
find its pattern in our time, is not unworthy to 
be proposed for another attempt before a great 
University. 



IX 

On the Lineage of English Literature (II) 

Some of you whose avocations call you, from 
time to time, to Newmarket may have noted, at 
a little distance out from Cambridge, a by-road 
advertised as leading to Quy and Swaffham. It 
also leads to the site of an old Roman villa: but 
you need not interrupt your business to visit this, 
since the best thing discovered there — a piece of 
tessellated pavement — has been removed and de- 
posited in the Geological Museum in Downing 
Street, where you may study it very conveniently. 
It is not at all a first-class specimen of its kind: 
not to be compared, for example, with the wonder- 
ful pavement at Dorchester, or with that (measur- 
ing 35 feet by 20) of the great villa unearthed, a 
hundred years ago, at Stonesfield in Oxfordshire: 
but I take it as the handiest, and am going to build 
a small conjecture upon it, or rather a small sug- 
gestion of a guess. Remember there is no harm 
in guessing so long as we do not pretend our guess- 
work to be something else. 

201 



202 On the Art of Writing 

I will ask you to consider first that in these 
pavements, laid bare for us as "the whistling rustic 
tends his plough," we have work dating some- 
where between the first and fifth centuries, work of 
unchallengeable beauty, work of a beauty certainly 
not rivalled until we come to the Norman builders 
of five or six hundred years later. I want you to 
let your minds dwell on these long stretches of 
time — four hundred years or so of Roman occu- 
pation (counting, not from Caesar's raids, but from 
the serious invasion of 43 a.d. under Aulus Plau- 
tius, say to some while after the famous letter of 
Honorius, calling home the legions). You may 
safely put it at four hundred years, and then count 
six hundred as the space before the Normans 
arrive — a thousand years altogether, or but a 
fraction — one short generation — less than the 
interval of time that separates us from King 
Alfred. In the great Cathedral of Winchester 
(where sleep, by the way, two gentle writers 
specially beloved, Isaak Walton and Jane Austen) 
above the choir-screen to the south, you may see a 
line of painted chests, of which the inscription 
on one tells you that it holds what was mortal 
of King Canute. 

Here are sands, ignoble things, 
Dropp'd from the ruin'd sides of Kings. 



Lineage of English Literature 203 

But if you walk around to the north of the altar 
you will find yourself treading on tiles not so very 
far short of twice that antiquity. Gentlemen, do 
not think that I would ever speak lightly of our 
lineage : only let us make as certain as we may what 
that lineage is. 

I want you to-day to understand just what such 
a pavement as that preserved for your inspection 
in Downing Street meant to the man who saw it 
laid and owned it these fifteen hundred years — 
more or less — ago. Ubi Romanus vicit, ibi habitat — 
"where the Roman has conquered, there he set- 
tles" : but whether he conquered or settled he car- 
ried these small tiles, these tessellce, as religiously 
as ever Rachel stole her teraphin. "Wherever his 
feet went there went the tessellated pavement for 
them to stand on. Even generals on foreign 
service carried in panniers on muleback the little 
coloured cubes or tessellce for laying down a pave- 
ment in each camping-place, to be taken up again 
when they moved forward. In England the same 
sweet emblems of the younger gods of poetic legend, 
of love, youth, plenty, and all their happy natu- 
ralism, are found constantly repeated." 1 I am 
quoting these sentences from a local historian, but 

1 Prom A History of Oxfordshire, by Mr. J. Meade Falkner, 
author of Murray's excellent Handbook of Oxfordshire. 



204 On the Art of Writing 

you see how these relics have a knack of inspiring 
prose at once scholarly and imaginative, as (for 
a more famous instance) the urns disinterred at 
Walsingham once inspired Sir Thomas Browne's. 
To continue and adapt the quotation — 

Bacchus with his wild rout, Orpheus playing to a 
spell-bound audience, Apollo singing to the lyre, 
Venus in Mars' embrace, Neptune with a host of 
seamen, scollops, and trumpets, Narcissus by the 
fountain, Jove and Ganymede, Leda and the swan, 
wood-nymphs and naiads, satyrs and fauns, masks, 
hautboys, cornucopias, flowers and baskets of golden 
fruit — what touches of home they must have seemed 
to these old dwellers in the Cambridgeshire wilds ! 

Yes, touches of home! For the owner of this 
villa (you may conceive) is the grandson or even 
great-great-grandson of the colonist who first 
built it, following in the wake of the legionaries. 
The family has prospered and our man is now a 
considerable landowner. He was born in Britain : 
his children have been born here : and here he lives 
a comfortable, well-to-do, out-of-door life, in its 
essentials I daresay not so very unlike the life of an 
English country squire to-day. Instead of chas- 
ing foxes or hares he hunts the wolf and the wild 
boar; but the sport is good and he returns with an 
appetite. He has added a summer parlour to the 



Lineage of English Literature 205 

house, with a northern aspect and no heating-flues ; 
for the old parlour he has enlarged the praefur- 
nium, and through the long winter evenings sits 
far better warmed than many a master of a mod- 
ern country-house. A belt of trees on the brow 
of the rise protects him from the worst winds, and 
to the south his daughters have planted violet- 
beds which will breathe odorously in the spring. 
He has rebuilt and enlarged the slave-quarters and 
outhouses, replaced the stucco pillars around the 
atrium with a colonnade of polished stone, and, 
where stucco remains, has repainted it in fresh 
colours. He knows that there are no gaps or weak 
spots in his stockade fence---wood is always cheap. 
In a word he has improved the estate ; is modestly 
proud of it ; and will be content, like the old Athen- 
ian, to leave his patrimony not worse but some- 
thing better than he found it. 

Sensible men — and the Romans were eminently 
that — as a rule contrive to live decently, or, at 
least, tolerably. What struck Arthur Young more 
than anything else in his travels through France 
on the very eve of the Revolution seems to have 
been the general good-tempered happiness of the 
French gentry on their estates. We may moralise 
of the Roman colonists as of the French proprietors 
that "unconscious of their doom the little victims 



2o6 On the Art of Writing 

played"; but we have no right to throw back on 
them the shadow of what was to come or to cloud 
the picture of a useful, peaceable, maybe more 
than moderately happy life, with our later know- 
ledge of disaster mercifully hidden from it. 

Although our colonist and his family have all 
been born in Britain, are happy enough here on the 
whole, and talk without more than half meaning it, 
and to amuse themselves with speculations half- 
wistful, of daring the tremendous journey and 
setting eyes on Rome some day, their pride is to 
belong to her, to Rome, the imperial City, the city 
afar: their windows open back towards her as 
Daniel's did towards Jerusalem — Urbs quam dicunt 
Romam — the City. Along the great road, hard 
by, her imperial writ runs. They have never 
subscribed to the vow of Ruth. ' ' Thy people 
shall be my people and thy God my God. " They 
dwell under the ( Pax Romana, not merely pro- 
tected by it but as citizens. Theirs are the ances- 
tral deities portrayed on that unfading pavement 
in the very centre of the villa — Apollo and Daphne, 
Bacchus and Ariadne — 

For ever warm and still to be enjoyed, 
For ever panting, and for ever young. 

Parcels come to them, forwarded from the near 



Lineage of English Literature 207 

military station ; come by those trade-routes, mys- 
terious to us, concerning which a most illuminating 
book waits to be written by somebody. There 
are parcels of seeds — useful vegetables and pot- 
herbs, helichryse (marigolds as we call them now) 
for the flower garden, for the colonnade even roses 
with real Italian earth damp about their roots. 
There are parcels of books, too — rolls rather, or 
tablets — wherein the family reads about Rome ; of 
its wealth, the uproar of its traffic, the innumerable 
chimneys smoking, jumum et opes strepitumque. 
For they are always reading of Rome; feeling 
themselves, as they read, to belong to it, to be 
neither savage nor even rustic, but by birthright 
of the city, urbane; and what these exiles read is 
of how Horace met a bore on the Sacred Road 
(which would correspond, more or less, with our 
Piccadilly) — 

Along the Sacred Road I strolled one day 
Deep in some bagatelle (you know my way) 
When up comes one whose face I scarcely knew — 
"The dearest of dear fellows! how d'ye do?" 
— He grasped my hand. "Well, thanks! The same 
to you?" 

— or of how Horace apologises for protracting a 
summer jaunt to his country seat : — 



208 On the Art of Writing 

Five days I told you at my farm I'd stay, 
And lo! the whole of August I'm away. 
Well but, Maecenas, you would have me live, 
And, were I sick, my absence you'd forgive. 
So let me crave indulgence for the fear 
Of falling ill at this bad time of year. 
When, thanks to early figs and sultry heat, 
The undertaker figures with his suite; 
When fathers all and fond mammas grow pale 
At what may happen to their young heirs male, 
And courts and levees, town-bred mortals' ills, 
Bring fevers on, and break the seals of wills. J 

Consider those lines; then consider how long it 
took the inhabitants of this island — the cultured 
ones who count as readers or writers — to recapture 
just that note of urbanity. Other things our fore- 
fathers — Britons, Saxons, Normans, Dutch or 
French refugees — discovered by the way; worthier 
things if you will; but not until the eighteenth 
century do you find just that note recaptured; the 
note of easy confidence that our London had .be- 
come what Rome had been, the Capital city. You 
begin to meet it in Dryden; with Addison it is 
fairly established. Pass a few years, and with 
Samuel Johnson it is taken for granted. His 
London is Juvenal's Rome, and the same satire 
applies to one as applied to the other. But against 
the urbane lines written by one Horace some while 

1 Conington's translation. 



Lineage of English Literature 209 

before Juvenal let us set a passage from another 
Horace — Horace Walpole, seventeen hundred 
years later and some little while ahead of Johnson. 
He, like our Roman colonist, is a settler in a new 
country, Twickenham; and like Flaccus he loves 
to escape from town life. 

Twickenham, June 8th, 1747. 

To the Hon. H. S. Conway. 

You perceive by my date that I am got into a new 
camp, and have left my tub at Windsor. It is a little 
plaything-house that I got out of Mrs. Chevenix's 
shop, and the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set 
in enamelled meadows with filagree hedges: 

A small Euphrates through the place is roll'd, 
And little finches wave their wings of gold. 

Two delightful roads, that you would call dusty, supply 
me continually with coaches and chaises: barges as 
solemn as Barons of the Exchequer move under my 
window; Richmond Hill and Ham Walks bound my 
prospect; but, thank God! the Thames is between 
me and the Duchess of Queensberry. Dowagers as 
plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and Pope's ghost 
is just now skimming under my window by the most 
poetical moonlight. . . . The Chevenixes had tricked 
it out for themselves; up two pairs of stairs is what 
they call Mr. Chevenix's library, furnished with three 
maps, one shelf, a bust of Sir Isaac Newton and a lame 
telescope without any glasses. Lord John Sackville 
predeceased me here and instituted certain games 
14 



210 On the Art of Writing 

called cricketalia, which have been celebrated this 
very evening in honour of him in a neighbouring 
meadow. 

You will think I have removed my philosophy from 
Windsor with my tea-things hither; for I am writing 
to you in all tranquillity while a Parliament is bursting 
about my ears. You know it is going to be dissolved. 
They say the Prince has taken up two hundred thou- 
sand pounds, to carry elections which he won't carry 
— he had much better have saved it to buy the Parlia- 
ment after it is chosen. 

There you have Horatio Walpole, the man-about- 
town, almost precisely echoing Horatius Flaccus, 
the man-about-town ; and this (if you will bring 
your minds to it) is just the sort of passage a Ro- 
man colonist in Britain would open upon, out of 
his parcel of new books, and read, and understand, 
some eighteen hundred years ago. 

What became of it all? — of that easy colonial 
life, of the men and women who trod those tessel- 
lated pavements? "Wiped out," say the histori- 
ans, knowing nothing, merely guessing: for you 
may with small trouble assure yourselves that the 
fifth and sixth centuries in the story of this island 
are a blind spot, concerning which one man's guess 
may be as good as another's. " Wiped out," they 
will commonly agree ; for while, as I warned you in 
another lecture, the pedantic mind, faced with a 



Lineage of English Literature 211 

difficulty, tends to remove it conveniently into a 
category to which it does not belong, still more 
prone is the pedantic mind to remove it out 
of existence altogether. So "wiped out" is the 
theory ; and upon it a sympathetic imagination can 
invent what sorrowful pictures it will of departing 
legions, the last little cloud of dust down the 
highway, the lovers by the gate watching it, not 
comprehending; the peaceful homestead in the 
background, ripe for doom — and what-not. 

Or, stay ! There is another theory to which the 
late Professor Freeman inclined (if so sturdy a 
figure could be said to incline), laying stress on 
a passage in Gildas, that the Romans in Britain, 
faced by the Saxon invader, got together their 
money, and bolted away into Gaul. "The Ro- 
mans that were in Britain gathered together their 
gold-hoard, hid part in the ground and carried 
the rest over to Gaul," writes Gildas. "The 
hiding in the ground, " says Freeman, "is of course 
a guess to explain the frequent finding of Roman 
coins" — which indeed it does explain better than 
the guess that they were carried away, and perhaps 
better than the schoolboy's suggestion that during 
their occupation of Britain the Romans spent most 
of their time in dropping money about. Likely 
enough, large numbers of the colonists did gather 



212 On the Art of Writing 

up what they could and flee before the approach- 
ing storm; but by no means all, I think. For 
(since, where all is uncertain, we must reason from 
what is probable of human nature) in the first 
place men with large estates do not behave in 
that way before a danger which creeps upon them 
little by little, as this Saxon danger did. These 
colonists could not dig up their fields and carry 
them over to Gaul. They did not keep banking 
accounts ; and in the course of four hundred years 
their main wealth had certainly been sunk in the 
land. They could not carry away their villas. 
We know that many of them did not carry away 
the tessellce for which (as we have seen) they had so 
peculiar a veneration ; for these remain. Secondly, 
if the colonists left Britain in a mass, when in 
the middle of the sixth century we find Belisarius 
offering the Goths to trade Britain for Sicily, as 
being "much larger and this long time subservient 
to Roman rule," 1 we must suppose either (as 
Freeman appears to suppose) that Belisarius did 
not know what he was offering, or that he was 
attempting a gigantic "bluff," or lastly that he 
really was offering an exchange not flatly derisory ; 
of which three possible suppositions I prefer the 
last as the likeliest. Nor am I the less inclined 
1 Bell. Goth., ii., 6. 



Lineage of English Literature 213 

to choose it, because these very English historians 
go on to clear the ground in a like convenient way 
of the Celtic inhabitants, exterminating them as 
they exterminated the Romans, with a wave of 
the hand, quite in the fashion of Mr. Podsnap. 
"This is un-English: therefore for me it merely 
ceases to exist." 

" Probable extirpation of the Celtic inhabitants" 
jots down Freeman in his margin, and proceeds to 
write : 

In short, though the literal extirpation of a nation is 
an impossibility, there is every reason to believe that 
the Celtic inhabitants of those parts of Britain which 
had become English at the end of the sixth century 
had been as nearly extinguished as a nation could be. 
The women doubtless would be largely spared, but as 
far as the male sex is concerned we may feel sure that 
death, emigration, or personal slavery were the only 
alternatives which the vanquished found at the hands 
of our fathers. 

Upon this passage, if brought to me in an under- 
graduate essay, I should have much to say. The 
style, with its abstract nouns ("the literal extir- 
pation of a nation is an impossibility"), its padding 
and periphrasis ("there is every reason to believe" 
. . ."as far as the male sex is concerned we may 
feel sure") betrays the loose thought. It begins 
with "in short" and proceeds to be long-winded. 



214 On the Art of Writing 

It commits what even schoolboys know to be a 
solecism by inviting us to consider three "alter- 
natives"; and what can I say of "the women 
doubtless would be largely spared," save that 
besides scanning in iambics it says what Freeman 
never meant and what no-one outside of an Aristo- 
phanic comedy could ever suggest? "The women 
doubtless would be largely spared!" It reminds 
me of the young lady in Cornwall who, asked by 
her vicar if she had been confirmed, admitted 
blushingly that "she had reason to believe, parti- 
ally so." 

"The women doubtless would be largely 
spared!" — But I thank the Professor for teaching 
me that phrase, because it tries to convey just what 
I am driving at. The Jutes, Angles, Saxons, did 
not extirpate the Britons, whatever you may hold 
concerning the Romans. For, once again, men 
do not behave in that way, and certainly will not 
when a live slave is worth money. Secondly, the 
very horror with which men spoke, centuries after, 
of Anderida quite plainly indicates that such a 
wholesale massacre was exceptional, monstrous. 
If not exceptional, monstrous, why should this 
particular slaughter have lingered so ineffaceably 
in their memories? Finally, — and to be as curt 
as the question deserves — the Celtic Briton in the 



Lineage of English Literature 215 

island was not exterminated and never came near 
to being exterminated: but on the contrary, re- 
mains equipollent with the Saxon in our blood, and 
perhaps equipollent with that mysterious race we 
call Iberian, which came before either and endures 
in this island to-day, as anyone travelling it with 
eyes in his head can see. Pict, Dane, Norman, 
Frisian, Huguenot French — these and others come 
in. If mixture of blood be a shame, we have 
purchased at the price of that shame the glory of 
Catholicism ; and I know of nothing more false in 
science or more actively poisonous in politics or in 
the arts than the assumption that we belong as a 
race to the Teutonic family. 

Dane, Norman, Frisian, French Huguenot — 
they all come in. And will you refuse a hearing 
when I claim that the Roman came in too? Be- 
think you how deeply Rome engraved itself on this 
island and its features. Bethink you that, as 
human nature is, no conquering race ever lived 
or could live — even in garrison — among a tribu- 
tary one without begetting children on it. Be- 
think you yet further of Freeman's admission that 
in the wholesale (and quite hypothetical) general 
massacre ' ' the women doubtless would be largely 
spared"; and you advance nearer to my point. I 
see a people which for four hundred years was 



216 On the Art of Writing 

permeated by Rome. If you insist on its being a 
Teutonic people (which I flatly deny) then you 
have one which alone of Teutonic peoples has inher- 
ited the Roman gift of consolidating conquest, of 
colonising in the wake of its armies ; of driving the 
road, bridging the ford, bringing the lawless under 
its sense of law. I see that this nation of ours 
concurrently, when it seeks back to what alone can 
inspire and glorify these activities, seeks back, not 
to any supposed native North, but south to the 
Middle Sea of our civilisation and steadily to Italy, 
which we understand far more easily than France 
• — though France has helped us times and again. 
Putting these things together, I retort upon the 
ethnologists — for I come from the West of England, 
where we suffer incredible things from them — 
11 Semper ego auditor tantunt?" I hazard that the 
most important thing in our blood is that purple 
drop of the imperial murex we derive from Rome. 

You must, of course, take this for nothing more 
than it pretends to be — a conjecture, a suggestion. 
I will follow it up with two statements of fact, 
neither doubtful nor disputable. 

The first is, that when English poetry awoke, 
long after the Conquest (or, as I should prefer to 
put it, after the Crusades) it awoke a new thing; 
in its vocabulary as much like Anglo-Saxon poetry 



Lineage of English Literature 217 

as ever you will, but in metre, rhythm, lilt — and 
more, in style, feeling, imaginative play — and yet 
more again, in knowledge of what it aimed to be, 
in the essentials, in the qualities that make poetry 
poetry — as different from Anglo-Saxon poetry as 
cheese is from chalk, and as much more nutritious. 
Listen to this — 

Bytuene Mershe ant Averil 

When spray biginnith to spring, 

The lutel foul hath hire wyl 
On hire lud to synge : 

Ich libbe in love-longinge 

For semlokest of alle thynge, 

He may me blisse bringe, 

Icham in hire bandoun. 
An hendy hap ichabbe y-hent, 
Ichot from hevene if is me sent, 
From alle wymmen my love is lent, 
And lyht on Alisoun. 

Here you have alliteration in plenty; you even 
have what some hold to be the pattern of Anglo- 
Saxon alliterative verse (though in practice dis- 
regarded, may be, as often as not), the chosen 
initial used twice in the first line and once at least 
in the second: 

From alle wymmen my love is Zent, 
And Zyht on A/isoun. 



218 On the Art of Writing 

But if a man cannot see a difference infinitely 
deeper than any similarity between this song of 
Alison and the old Anglo-Saxon verse — a difference 
of nature — I must despair of his literary sense. 

What has happened? Well, in Normandy, too, 
and in another tongue, men are singing much the 
same thing in the same way: 

A la fontenelle 

Qui sort seur 1'araine, 

Trouvai pastorella 

Qui n'iert pas vilaine . . . 
Merci, merci, douce Marote, 
N'ociez pas vostre ami doux, 

and this Norman and the Englishman were singing 
to a new tune, which was yet an old tune re-set to 
Europe by the Provence, the Roman Province ; by 
the troubadours— Pons de Capdeuil, Bernard de 
Ventadour, Bertrand de Born, Pierre Vidal, and 
the rest, with William of Poitou, William of Poi- 
tiers. Read and compare; you will perceive that 
the note then set persists and has never perished. 
Take Giraud de Borneil — 

Bel companhos, si dormetz o velhatz 

Non dortmatz plus, qu'el jorn es apropchatz — 

and set it beside a lyric of our day, written without 
a thought of Giraud de Borneil — 



Lineage of English Literature 219 

Heigh! brother mine, art a- waking or a-sleeping: 
Mind'st thou the merry moon a many summers fled ? 
Mind'st thou the green and the dancing and the 

leaping? 
Mind'st thou the haycocks and the moon above them 

creeping? . . . 

Or take Bernard de Ventadour's — 

Quand erba vertz, e fuelha par 
E'l flor brotonon per verjan, 
E'l rossinhols autet e clar 
Leva sa votz e mov son chan, 
Joy ai de luy, e joy ai de la flor, 
Joy ai de me, e de me dons maior. 

Why, it runs straight off into English verse — 

When grass is green and leaves appear 
With flowers in bud the meads among, 

And nightingale aloft and clear 

Lifts up his voice and pricks his song, 

Joy, joy have I in song and flower, 

Joy in myself, and in my lady more. 

And that may be doggerel; yet what is it but 

It was a lover and his lass, 

With a hey and a ho and a hey nonino, 

That o'er the green cornfield did pass 

In the spring-time, the only pretty ring-time — 



or 



When daffodils begin to peer, 

With heigh ! the doxy over the dale, 

Why then comes in the sweet o' the year; 
For the red blood reigns in the winter's pale. 



220 On the Art of Writing 

Nay, flatter the Anglo-Saxon tradition by pick- 
ing its very best — and I suppose it hard to find 
better than the much-admired opening of Piers 
Plowman, in which that tradition shot up like the 
flame of a dying candle : 

Bote in a Mayes Morwnynge — on Malverne hulles 

Me bi-fel a f erly — a Feyrie me thouhte ; 

I was weori of wandringe — and wente me to reste 

Under a brod banke — bi a Bourne syde, 

And as I lay and leonede — and lokede on the watres, 

I slumberde in a slepynge — hit sownede so murie. 

This is good, solid stuff, no doubt : but tame, inert, 
if not actually lifeless. As M. Jusserand says of 
Anglo-Saxon poetry in general, it is like the river 
Saone — one doubts which way it flows. How 
tame in comparison with this, for example! — 

In somer, when the shawes be sheyne, 

And leves be large and long, 
Hit is full mery in feyre foreste 

To here the foulys song: 

To se the dere draw to the dale 

And leve the hilles hee, 
And shadow hem in the leves grene 

Under the grene-wode tre. 

Hit befel on Whitsontide, 

Erly in a May mornyng, 
The Son up feyre can shyne, 

And the briddis mery can syng. 



Lineage of English Literature 221 

1 'This is a mery mornyng, " said litell John, 

"Be Hym that dyed on tre; 
A more mery man than I am one 

Lyves not in Cristiante. 

"Pluk up thi hert, my dere mayster," 

Litull John can sey, 
"And thynk hit is a full fayre tyme 

In a mornyng of May." 

There is no doubting which way that flows! And 
this vivacity, this new beat of the heart of poetry, 
is common to Chaucer and the humblest ballad- 
maker; it pulses through any book of lyrics 
printed yesterday, and it came straight to us out 
of Provence, the Roman Province. It was the 
Provencal Troubadour who, like the Prince in the 
fairy tale, broke through the hedge of briers and 
kissed Beauty awake again. 

You will urge that he wakened Poetry not in 
England alone but all over Europe, in Dante before 
our Chaucer, in the trouveres and minnesingers as 
well as in our ballad-writers. To that I might 
easily retort, "So much the better for Europe, 
and the more of it the merrier, to win their way 
into the great comity." But here I put in my 
second assertion, that we English have had above 
all nations lying wide of the Mediterranean, the 



222 On the Art of Writing 

instinct to refresh and renew ourselves at Medi- 
terranean wells ; that again and again our writers — 
our poets especially — have sought them as the hart 
panteth after the water-brooks. If you accept 
this assertion, and if you believe as well that our 
literature, surpassing Rome's, may vie with that 
of Athens — if you believe that a literature which 
includes Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Pope, 
Wordsworth, Shelley — the Authorised Version of 
Holy Writ, with Browne, Bunyan, Swift, Addi- 
son, Johnson, Arnold, Newman — has entered the 
circle to take its seat with the first — why then, 
heartily believing this with you, I leave you to 
find some better explanation than mine if you can. 
But what I content myself with asserting here 
you can scarcely deny. Chaucer's initial and 
enormous debt to Dante and Boccaccio stands in 
as little dispute as Dunbar's to Chaucer. On that 
favourite poet of mine, Sir Thomas Wyat, I 
descanted in a former lecture. He is one of your 
glories here, having entered St. John's College at 
the age of twelve (which must have been preco- 
cious even for those days) . Anthony Wood asserts 
that after finishing his course here, he proceeded to 
Cardinal Wolsey's new College at Oxford; but, 
as Christchurch was not founded until 1524, and 
Wyat, still precocious, had married a wife two 



Lineage of English Literature 223 

years before that, the statement (to quote Dr. 
Courthope) "seems no better founded than 
many others advanced by that patriotic but not 
very scrupulous author. " It is more to the point 
that he went travelling, and brought home from 
France, Italy, afterwards Spain — always from 
Latin altars — the flame of lyrical poetry to Eng- 
land; the flame of the Petrarchists, caught from 
the Troubadours, clarified (so to speak) by the salt 
of humane letters. On what our Elizabethan 
literature owes to the Classical revival hundreds of 
volumes have been written and hundreds more will 
be written; I will but remind you of what Spenser 
talked about with Gabriel Harvey, what Daniel 
disputed with Campion; that Marlowe tried to 
re-incarnate Machiavelli, that Jonson was a sworn 
Latinist and the "tribe of Ben" a classical tribe; 
while, as for Shakespeare, go and reckon the pro- 
portion of Italian and Roman names in his dram- 
atis personcB. Of Donne's debt to France, Italy, 
Rome, Greece, you may read much in Professor 
Grierson's great edition, and I daresay Professor 
Grierson would be the first to allow that all has 
not yet been computed. You know how Milton 
prepared himself to be a poet. Have you realised 
that, in those somewhat strangely constructed 
sonnets of his, Milton was deliberately modelling 



224 On the Art of Writing 

upon the Horatian Ode, as his confrere, Andrew 
Marvell, was avowedly attempting the like in 
his famous Horatian Ode on Cromwell's Return 
from Ireland; so that if Cromwell had returned 
(like Mr. Quilp), walked in and caught his pair of 
Latin Secretaries scribbling verse, one at either 
end of the office table, both might colourably have 
pleaded that they were, after all, writing Latin. 
Waller's task in poetry was to labour true classical 
polish where Cowley laboured sham-classical form. 
Put together Dry den's various Prefaces and you 
will find them one solid monument to his classical 
faith. Of Pope, Gray, Collins, you will not ask 
me to speak. What is salt in Cowper you can 
taste only when you have detected that by a 
stroke of madness he missed, or barely missed, 
being our true English Horace, that almost more 
nearly than the rest he hit what the rest had been 
seeking. Then, of the "romantic revival" — 
enemy of false classicism, not of classicism — be- 
think you what, in his few great years, Wordsworth 
owed directly to France of the early Revolution; 
what Keats drew forth out of Lempriere : and again 
bethink you how Tennyson wrought upon Theocri- 
tus, Virgil, Catullus ; upon what Arnold constantly 
shaped his verse ; how Browning returned ever upon 
Italy to inspire his best and correct his worse. 



Lineage of English Literature 225 

Of Anglo-Saxon prose I know little indeed, but 
enough of the world to feel reasonably sure that 
if it contained any single masterpiece — or any- 
thing that could be paraded as a masterpiece — we 
should have heard enough about it long before now. 
It was invented by King Alfred for excellent po- 
litical reasons; but, like other ready-made politi- 
cal inventions in this country, it refused to thrive. 
I think it can be demonstrated, that the true line 
of intellectual descent in prose lies through Bede 
(who wrote in Latin, the "universal language"), 
and not through the Blickling Homilies, or ^Elfric, 
or the Saxon Chronicle. And I am sure that 
Freeman is perversely wrong when he laments as a 
"great mistake" that the first Christian mission- 
aries from Rome did not teach their converts to 
pray and give praise in the vernacular. The 
vernacular being what it was, these men did better 
to teach the religion of the civilised world — orbis 
terrarum — in the language of the civilised world. 
I am not thinking of its efficiency for spreading 
the faith; but neither is Freeman; and, for that, 
we must allow these old missionaries to have 
known their own business. I am thinking only 
of how this "great mistake" affected our litera- 
ture; and if you will read Professor Saintsbury's 

History of English Prose Rhythm (pioneer work 

is 



226 On the Art of Writing 

which yet wonderfully succeeds in illustrating what 
our prose- writers from time to time were trying to 
do) ; if you will study the Psalms in the Authorised 
Version ; if you will consider what Milton, Claren- 
don, Sir Thomas Browne, were aiming at; what 
Addison, Gibbon, Johnson ; what Landor, Thacke- 
ray, Newman, Arnold, Pater; I doubt not your 
rising from the perusal convinced that our nation, 
in this storehouse of Latin to refresh and replenish 
its most sacred thoughts, has enjoyed a continu- 
ous blessing: that the Latin of the Vulgate and 
the Offices has been a background giving depth 
and, as the painters say, "value " to nine-tenths 
of our serious writing. 

And now, since this and the previous lecture run 
something counter to a great deal of that teaching 
in English Literature which nowadays passes most 
acceptably, let me avoid offence, so far as may be, 
by defining one or two things I am not trying to do. 

I am not persuading you to despise your lin- 
guistic descent. English is English — our lan- 
guage; and all its history to be venerated by us. 

I am not persuading you to despise linguistic 
study. All learning is venerable. 

I am not persuading you to behave like Ascham, 
and turn English prose into pedantic Latin; nor 
would I have you doubt that in the set quarrel 



Lineage of English Literature 227 

between Campion, who wished to divert English 
verse into strict classical channels, and Daniel, 
who vindicated our free English way (derived 
from Latin through the Provencal), Daniel was on 
the whole, right, Campion on the whole, wrong : 
though I believe that both ways yet lie open, and 
we may learn, if we study them intelligently, a 
hundred things from the old classical metres. 

I do not ask you to forget what there is of the 
Northmen in your blood. If I desired this, I 
could not worship William Morris as I do, among 
the later poets. 

I do not ask you to doubt that the barbarian 
invaders from the north, with their myths and 
legends, brought new and most necessary blood 
of imagination into the literary material — for the 
time almost exhausted — of Greece and Rome. 

Nevertheless, I do contend that when Britain 
(or, if you prefer it, Sleswick) 

When Sleswick first at Heaven's command 
Arose from out the azure main, 

she differed from Aphrodite, that other foam-born, 

in sundry important features of ear, of lip, of eye. 

Lastly, if vehement assertions on the one side 

have driven me into too vehement dissent on the 



228 On the Art of Writing 

other, I crave pardon; not for the dissent but for 
the vehemence, as sinning against the very prin- 
ciple I would hold up to your admiration — the 
old Greek principle of avoiding excess. 

But I do commend the patient study of Greek 
and Latin authors — in the original or in trans- 
lation — to all of you who would write English ; and 
for three reasons. 

(i) In the first place they will correct your 
insularity of mind; or, rather, will teach you to 
forget it. The Anglo-Saxon, it has been noted, 
ever left an empty space around his houses; and 
that, no doubt, is good for a house. It is not so 
good for the mind. 

(2) Secondly, we have a tribal habit, con- 
firmed by Protestant meditation upon a Hebraic 
religion, of confining our literary enjoyment to the 
written word and frowning down the drama, the 
song, the dance. A fairly attentive study of mod- 
ern lyrical verse has persuaded me that this 
exclusiveness may be carried too far, and threatens 
to be deadening. "I will sing and give praise," 
says the Scripture, "with the best member that 
I have " — meaning the tongue. But the old Greek 
was an "all-round man" as we say. He sought 
to praise and give thanks with all his members, 



Lineage of English Literature 229 

and to tune each to perfection. I think his way- 
worth your considering. 

(3) Lastly, and chiefly, I commend these 
classical authors to you because they, in the 
European civilisation which we all inherit, con- 
serve the norm of literature; the steady grip 
on the essential; the clean outline at which in 
verse or in prose — in epic, drama, history, or philo- 
sophical treatise — a writer should aim. 
' So sure am I of this, and of its importance to 
those who think of writing, that were this Univer- 
sity to limit me to three texts on which to preach 
English Literature to you, I should choose the 
Bible in our Authorised Version, Shakespeare, 
and Homer (though it were but in a prose trans- 
lation). Two of these lie outside my marked 
province. Only one of them finds a place in your 
English school. But Homer, who comes neither 
within my map, nor within the ambit of the 
Tripos, would — because he most evidently holds 
the norm, the essence, the secret of all — rank 
first of the three for my purpose. 



X 
English Literature in our Universities (I) 

All lectures are too long. Towards the close 
of my last, Gentlemen, I let fall a sentence which, 
heard by you in a moment of exhausted or languid 
interest, has since, like enough, escaped your 
memory even if it earned passing attention. So 
let me repeat it, for a fresh start. 

Having quoted to you the words of our Holy 
Writ, "I will sing and give praise with the best 
member that I have," I added, "But the old 
Greek was an 'all-round' man; he sought to 
praise and give thanks with all his members, and 
to tune each to perfection." Now a great many 
instructive lectures might be written on that text : 
nevertheless you may think it a strange one, and 
obscure, for the discourse on "English Literature 
in our Universities" which, according to promise, 
I must now attempt. 

The term "an all-round man" may easily mis- 
lead you unless you take it with the rest of the 

230 



Literature in our Universities 231 

sentence and particularly with the words "praise 
and give thanks." Praise whom? Give thanks 
to whom? To whom did our Greek train all his 
members to render adoration ? 

Why, to the gods — his gods: to Zeus, Apollo, 
Aphrodite; and from them down to the lesser 
guardian deities of the hearth, the field, the 
farmstead. We modern men suffer a double tempt- 
ation to misunderstand, by belittling, the rever- 
ence in which Hellas and Rome held their gods. 
To start with, our religion has superseded theirs. 
We approach the Olympians with no bent towards 
venerating them; with minds easy, detached, to 
which a great deal of their theology — the amative- 
ness of Zeus for example — must needs seem broadly 
comic, and a great deal of it not only comic but 
childish. We are encouraged in this, moreover, 
when we read such writers as Aristophanes and 
Lucian, and observe how they poked fun at the 
gods. We assume — so modern he seems — Aris- 
tophanes' attitude towards his immortals to be 
ours ; that when, for example, Prometheus walks on 
to the stage under an umbrella, to hide himself 
from the gaze of all-seeing Zeus, the Athenian 
audience laughed just as we laugh who have read 
Voltaire. Believe me, they laughed quite differ- 
ently ; believe me, Aristophanes and Voltaire had 



232 On the Art of Writing 

remarkably different minds and worked on utterly 
different backgrounds. Believe me, you will un- 
derstand Aristophanes only less than you will 
understand ^Eschylus himself if you confuse Aristo- 
phanes' mockery of Olympus with modern mockery. 
But, if you will not take my word for it, let me 
quote what Professor Gilbert Murray said, the 
other day, speaking before the English Association 
on Greek poetry, how constantly connected it is 
with religion: 

"All thoughts, all passions, all desires". . .In our 
Art it is true, no doubt, that they are "the ministers of 
love"; in Greek they are as a whole the ministers of 
religion, and this is what in a curious degree makes 
Greek poetry matter, makes it relevant. There is a 
sense in each song of a relation to the whole of things, 
and it was apt to be expressed with the whole body, or, 
one may say, the whole being. z 

To a Greek, in short, his gods mattered enor- 
mously; and to a Roman. To a Roman they con- 
tinued to matter enormously, down to the end. 
Do you remember that tessellated pavement with 
its emblems and images of the younger gods? 
and how I told you that a Roman general on for- 
eign service would carry the little cubes in panniers 

1 What English Poetry may still learn from Greek: a paper 
read before the English Association on Nov. 17, 191 1. 



Literature in our Universities 233 

on mule-back, to be laid down for his feet at the 
next camping-place ? Will you suggest that he did 
this because they were pretty? You know that 
practical men — conquering generals — don't be- 
have in that way. He did it because they were 
sacred; because, like most practical men, he was 
religious, and his gods must go with him. They 
filled his literature : for why ? He believed himself 
to be sprung from their loins. Where would Latin 
literature be, for example, if you could cut Venus 
out of it? Consider Lucretius' grand invocation: 

^Eneadum genetrix, hominum divumque voluptas, 
Alma Venus ! 

Consider the part Virgil makes her play as 
moving spirit of his whole great poem. So follow 
her down to the days of the later Empire and open 
the Pervigilium Veneris and discover her, under 
the name of Dione, still the eternal Aphrodite 
sprung from the foam amid the churning hooves 
of the sea-horses — inter et bipedes equos: — 

Time was that a rain-cloud begat her, impregning the 

heave of the deep, 
'Twixt hooves of sea-horses a-scatter, stampeding the 

dolphins as sheep. 
Lo ! arose of that bridal Dione, rainbow'd and besprent 

of its dew ! 
Now learn ye to love who loved never — now ye who have 

loved, love anew ! 



234 On the Art of Writing 

Her favour it was fill'd the sails of the Trojan for 

Latium bound, 
Her favour that won her ^Eneas a bride on Laurentian 

ground, 
And anon from the cloister inveigled the Virgin, the 

Vestal, to Mars; 
As her wit by the wild Sabine rape recreated her Rome 

for its wars 
With the Ramnes, Quirites, together ancestrally proud 

as they drew 
From Romulus down to our Caesar — last, best of that 

blood, of that thew. 
Now learn ye to love who loved never — now ye who have 

loved, love anew 1 

"Last, best of that blood" — her blood, fusa 
Paphies de cruore, and the blood of Teucer, revo- 
cato a sanguine Teucri, ' ' of that thew ' ' — the thew of 
Tros and of Mars. Of these and no less than these 
our Roman believed himself the son and inheritor. 

If we grasp this, that the old literature was 
packed with the old religion, and not only packed 
with it but permeated by it, we have within 
our ten fingers the secret of the "Dark Ages," 
the real reason why the Christian Fathers fought 
down literature and almost prevailed to the point 
of stamping it out. They hated it, not as litera- 
ture; or at any rate, not to begin with; nor, to 
begin with, because it happened to be voluptuous 
and they austere: but they hated it because it 



Literature in our Universities 235 

held in its very texture, not to be separated, a 
religion over which they had hardly triumphed, a 
religion actively inimical to that of Christ, inimical 
to truth; so that for the sake of truth and in the 
name of Christ they had to fight it, accepting no 
compromise, yielding no quarter, foreseeing no is- 
sue save that one of the twain — Jupiter or Christ, 
Deus Optimus Maximus or the carpenter's son 
of Nazareth — must go under. 

It all ended in compromise, to be sure; as all 
struggles must between adversaries so tremendous. 
To-day, in Dr. Smith's Classical Dictionary, Origen 
rubs shoulders with Orpheus and Orcus; Ter- 
tullian reposes cheek by jowl with Terpsichore. 
But we are not concerned, here, with what hap- 
pened in the end. We are concerned with what 
these forthright Christian fighters had in their 
minds — to trample out the old literature because 
of the false religion. Milton understood this, and 
was thinking of it when he wrote of the effect of 
Christ's Nativity — 

The Oracles are dumb; 

No voice or hideous hum 
Runs through the arched roof in words deceiving."' 

Apollo from his shrine 

Can no more divine, 
With hollow shriek the steep of Delphos leaving. 

No nightly trance, or breathed spell 



236 On the Art of Writing 

Inspires the pale-eyed Priest from the prophetic cell. 

The lonely mountains o'er, 

And the resounding shore, 
A voice of weeping heard, and loud lament; 

From haunted spring, and dale 

Edg'd with poplar pale, 
The parting Genius is with sighing sent; 

With flower-inwoven tresses torn 

The Nymphs in twilight shade of tangled thickets 
mourn. 

— as Swinburne understands and expresses it in 
his Hymn to Proserpine, supposed to be chanted 
by a Roman of the "old profession " on the morrow 
of Constantine's proclaiming the Christian faith : — 

Gods dethroned and deceased, cast forth, wiped out 

in a day! 
From your wrath is the world released, redeem'd from 

your chains, men say. 
New Gods are crown'd in the city; their flowers have 

broken your rods; 
They are merciful, clothed with pity, the young com- 
passionate Gods. 
But for me their new device is barren, the days are 

bare; 
Things long past over suffice, and men forgotten that 

were. . . 
Wilt thou yet take all, Galilean? but these thou shalt 

not take, 
The laurel, the palms and the paean, the breasts of the 

nymphs in the brake; 



Literature in our Universities 237 

Thou hast conquer'd, pale Galilean; the world has 

grown grey from thy breath; 
We have drunken of things Lethean, and fed on the 

fullness of death. 



* ' Thou hast conquer'd, O pale Galilean ! ' ' How- 
ever the struggle might sway in this or that other 
part of the field, Literature had to be beaten to her 
knees, and still beaten flat until the breath left her 
body. You will not be surprised that the heavy 
hand of these Christian Fathers fell first upon the 
Theatre : for the actor in Rome was by legal defini- 
tion an "infamous" man, even as in England until 
the other day he was by legal definition a vagabond 
and liable to whipping. The policy of religious 
reformers has ever been to close the theatres, as our 
Puritans did in 1642; and a recent pronouncement 
by the Bishop of Kensington would seem to show 
that the instinct survives to this day. Queen 
Elizabeth — like her brother, King Edward VI — 
signalised the opening of a new reign by inhibiting 
stage-plays; and I invite you to share with me 
the pensive speculation, "How much of English 
Literature, had she not relented, would exist to- 
day for a King Edward VII Professor to talk 
about?" Certainly the works of Shakespeare 
would not; and that seems to me a thought so 



238 On the Art of Writing 

impressive as to deserve the attention of bishops 
as well as of kings. 

Apart from this instinct the Christian Fathers, 
it would appear, had plenty of provocation. For 
the actors, who had jested with the Old Religion 
on a ground of accepted understanding — much as 
a good husband (if you will permit the simile) may 
gently tease his wife, not loving her one whit the 
less, taught by affection to play without offend- 
ing — had mocked at the New Religion in a very 
different way: savagely, as enemies, holding up 
to ridicule the Church's most sacred mysteries. 
Tertullian, in an uncompromising treatise De 
Spectaculis , denounces stage-plays root and branch; 
tells of a demon who entered into a woman in a 
theatre and on being exorcised pleaded that the 
mistake might well be excused, since he had found 
her in his own demesne. Christians should avoid 
these shows and await the greatest spectaculum of 
all — the Last Judgment. "Then," he promises 
genially, "will be the time to listen to the trage- 
dians, whose lamentations will be more poignant, 
for their proper pain. Then will the comedians 
turn and twist in capers rendered nimbler than 
ever by the sting of the fire that is not quenched. " 
By 400 a.d. Augustine cries triumphantly that 
the theatres are falling — the very walls of them 



Literature in our Universities 239 

tumbling — throughout the Empire. "Per omnes 
paene civitates cadunt theatra . . . cadunt et for a vel 
moenia in quibus demonia colebantur;" the very 
walls within which these devilments were practised. 
But the fury is unabated and goes on stamping 
down the embers. In the eighth century our own 
Alcuin (as the school of Freeman would affection- 
ately call him) is no less fierce. All plays are 
anathema to him, and he even disapproves of 
dancing bears — though not, it would appear, of 
bad puns: "nee tibi sit ursorum saltantium cura, sed 
clericorum psallentium, " x 

The banning of all literature you will find harder 
to understand; nay impossible, I believe, unless 
you accept the explanation I gave you. Yet there 
it is, an historical fact. "What hath it profited 
posterity — quid posteritas emolumenti tulit, " wrote 
Sulpicius Severus, about 400 A.D., "to read of 
Hector's fighting or Socrates' philosophising?" 
Pope Gregory the Great — St. Gregory, who sent 
us the Roman missionaries — made no bones about 
it at all. "Quoniam non cognovi liter atur am" he 
quoted approvingly from the 70th Psalm, "introibo 
in potentias Dornini": "Because I know nothing of 



1 See Mr. E. K. Chambers's Mediaeval Stage, Dr. Courthope's 
History of English Poetry, and Professor W. P. Ker's The Dark 
Ages. 



240 On the Art of Writing 

literature I shall enter into the strength of the 
Lord. " "The praises of Christ cannot be uttered 
in the same tongue as those of Jove, " writes this 
same Gregory to Desiderius, Archbishop of Vienne, 
who had been rash enough to introduce some of his 
young men to the ancient authors, with no worse 
purpose than to teach them a little grammar. Yet 
no one was prouder than this Pope of the histori- 
cal Rome which he had inherited. Alcuin, again, 
forbade the reading of Virgil in the monastery over 
which he presided: it would sully his disciples' 
imagination. "How is this, Virgilian!" he cried 
out upon one taken in the damnable act, — "that 
without my knowledge and against my order thou 
hast taken to studying Virgil?" To put a stop to 
this unhallowed indulgence the clergy solemnly 
taught that Virgil was a wizard. 

To us, long used as we are to the innocent 
gaieties of the Classical Tripos, these measures to 
discourage the study of Virgil may appear drastic, 
as the mental attitude of Gregory and Alcuin 
towards the Latin hexameter (so closely resembling 
that of Byron towards the waltz) not far removed 
from foolishness. But there you have in its 
quiddity the mediaeval mind : and the point I now 
put to you is, that out of this soil our universities 
grew. 



Literature in our Universities 241 

We, who claim Oxford and Cambridge for our 
nursing mothers, have of all men least excuse to 
forget it. A man of Ley den, of Lou vain, of 
Leipzig, of Berlin, may be pardoned that he 
passes it by. More than a hundred years ago 
Salamanca had the most of her stones torn down to 
make defences against Wellington's cannon. Paris, 
greatest of all, has kept her renown; but you 
shall search the slums of the Latin Quarter in 
vain for the sixty or seventy colleges that before 
the close of the fifteenth century, had arisen to 
adorn her, the intellectual Queen of Europe. 
In Bologna, the ancient and stately, almost alone 
among the continental universities, survive a few 
relics of the old collegiate system — the College 
of Spain, harbouring some five or six students, 
and a little house founded for Flemings in 1650: 
and in Bologna the system never attained to real 
importance. 

But in England where, great as London is, the 
national mind has always harked to the country for 
the graces of life, so that we seem by instinct to 
see it as only desirable in a green setting, our 
universities, planted by the same instinct on lawns 
watered by pastoral streams, have suffered so little 
and received so much from the years that now we 
can hardly conceive of Oxford or Cambridge as 
16 



242 On the Art of Writing 

ruined save by "the unimaginable touch of Time. " 
Of all the secular Colleges bequeathed to Oxford, 
she has lost not one ; while Cambridge (I believe) 
has parted only with Cavendish. Some have been 
subsumed into newer foundations ; but always the 
process has been one of merging, of blending, of 
justifying the new bottle by the old wine. The 
vengeance of civil war — always very much of a 
family affair in England — has dealt tenderly with 
Oxford and Cambridge; the more calculating 
malignity of Royal Commissions not harshly on 
the whole. University reformers may accuse both 
Oxford and Cambridge of 

Annihilating all that's made 

To a green thought in a green shade : 

but with those sour men we have nothing here 
to do: like Isaak Walton's milkmaid we will not 
1 ' load our minds with any fears of many things that 
will never be." 

But, as they stand, Oxford and Cambridge — so 
amazingly alike while they play at differences, and 
both so amazingly unlike anything else in the wide 
world — do by a hundred daily reminders connect us 
with the Middle Age, or, if you prefer Arnold's 
phrase, whisper its lost enchantments. The 
cloister, the grave grace in hall, the chapel bell, 



Literature in our Universities 243 

the men hurrying into their surplices or to lectures 
"with the wind in their gowns," the staircase, 
the nest of chambers within the oak — all these 
softly reverberate over our life here, as from bel- 
fries, the mediaeval mind. 

And that mediaeval mind actively hated (of 
partial acquaintance or by anticipation) almost 
everything we now study! Between it and us, 
except these memorials, nothing survives to-day 
but the dreadful temptation to learn, the dreadful 
instinct in men, as they grow older and wiser, to 
trust learning after all and endow it — that, and the 
confidence of a steady stream of youth. 

The Universities, then, sprang out of mediaeval 
life, out of the mediaeval mind ; and the mediaeval 
mind had for centuries been taught to abominate 
literature. I would not exaggerate or darken the 
"Dark Ages" for you by throwing too much bitu- 
men into the picture. I know that at the begin- 
ning there had been a school of Origen which 
advocated the study of Greek poetry and philosophy, 
as well as the school of Tertullian which condemned 
it. There is evidence that the "humanities" 
were cultivated here and there and after a fashion 
behind Gregory's august back. I grant that, while 
in Alcuin's cloister (and Alcuin, remember, became 
a sort of Imperial Director of Studies in Charle- 



244 On the Art of Writing 

magne's court) the wretched monk who loved 
Virgil had to study him with an illicit candle, to 
copy him with numbed fingers in a corner of the 
bitter-cold cloister, on the other hand many 
beautiful manuscripts preserved to us bear witness 
of cloisters where literature was tolerated if not 
officially honoured. I would not have you so 
uncritical as to blame the Church or its clergy 
for what happened; as I would have you remember 
that if the Church killed literature, she — and, one 
may say, she alone — kept it alive. 

Yet, and after all these reservations, it remains 
true that Literature had gone down disastrously. 
Even philosophy, unless you count the pale work of 
Boethius — real philosophy had so nearly perished 
that men possessed no more of Aristotle than a 
fragment of his Logic, and u the Philosopher'' had 
to creep back into Western Europe through trans- 
lations from the Arabic! But this is the point 
I wish to make clear. — Philosophy came back in 
the great intellectual revival of the twelfth cen- 
tury, Literature did not. Literature's hour had 
not come. Men had to catch up on a dreadful 
leeway of ignorance. The form did not matter as 
yet : they wanted science — to know. I should say, 
rather, that as yet form seemed not to matter: 
for in fact form always matters: the personal 



Literature in our Universities 245 

always matters: and you cannot explain the vast 
crowds Abelard drew to Paris save by the fascina- 
tion in the man, the fire communicated by the 
living voice. Moreover (as in a previous lecture 
I tried to prove) you cannot divorce accurate 
thought from accurate speech; but for accuracy, 
even for hair-splitting accuracy, of speech the 
universities had the definitions of the Schoolmen. 
In literature they had yet to discover a concern. 
Literature was a thing of the past, inanimate. 
Nowhere in Europe could it be felt even to breathe. 
To borrow a beautiful phrase of Wordsworth's, 
men numbered it among "things silently gone 
out of mind or things violently destroyed." 

Nobody quite knows how these Universities 
began. Least of all can anybody tell how Oxford 
and Cambridge began. In Bede, for instance — 
that is, in England as the eighth century opens — 
we see scholarship already moving towards the 
thing, treading with sure instinct towards the light. 
Though a hundred historians have quoted it, I 
doubt if a feeling man who loves scholarship can 
read the famous letter of Cuthbert describing 
Bede's end and not come nigh to tears. 

And Bede's story contains no less wonder than 
beauty, when you consider how the fame of this 
holy and humble man of heart, who never left his 



246 On the Art of Writing 

cloisters at Jarrow, spread over Europe, so that, 
though it sound incredible, our Northumbria 
narrowly missed in its day to become the pole-star 
of Western culture. But he was a disinterested 
genius, and his pupil, Alcuin, a pushing dull man 
and a born reactionary; so that, while Alcuin scored 
the personal success and went off to teach in 
the court of Charlemagne, the great chance was 
lost. 

No one knows when the great Universities were 
founded, or precisely out of what schools they 
grew; and you may derive amusement from the 
historians when they start to explain how Oxford 
and Cambridge in particular came to be chosen for 
sites. My own conjecture, that they were chosen 
for the extraordinary salubrity of their climates, 
has met (I regret to say) with derision, and may be 
set down to the caprice of one who ever inclines to 
think the weather good where he is happy. Our 
own learned historian, indeed — Mr. J. Bass Mul- 
linger — devotes some closely reasoned pages to 
proving that Cambridge was chosen as the unlikeli- 
est spot in the world, and is driven to quote the 
learned Poggio's opinion that the unheal thiness of 
a locality recommended it as a place of education 
for youth; as Plato, knowing naught of Christian- 
ity but gifted with a soul naturally Christian, 



Literature in our Universities 247 

"had selected a noisome spot for his Academe, in 
order that the mind might be strengthened by the 
weakness of the body. ' ' So difficult still it is for 
the modern mind to interpret the mediaeval! 

Most likely these Universities grew as a tree 
grows from a seed blown by chance of the wind. 
It seems easy enough to understand why Paris, 
that great city, should have possessed a great 
University; yet I surmise the processes at Oxford 
and Cambridge to have been only a little less for- 
tuitous. The schools of Remigius and of William 
of Champeaux (we will say) have given Paris a 
certain prestige, when Abelard, a pupil of William's, 
springs into fame and draws a horde of students 
from all over Europe to sit at his feet. These 
"nations" of young men have to be organised, 
brought under some sort of discipline, if only to 
make the citizens' lives endurable: and lo! the 
thing is done. In like manner Irnerius at Bologna, 
Vacarius at Oxford, and at Cambridge some 
innominate teacher, "of importance," as Brown- 
ing would put it, "in his day," possibly set the 
ball rolling ; or again it is suggested that a body of 
scholars dissatisfied with Oxford (such dissatis- 
faction has been known even in historical times) 
migrated hither — a laborious journey, even now- 
adays — and that so 



248 On the Art of Writing 

A brighter Hellas rears its mountains 
From waves serener far! 



These young or nascent bodies had a trick of 
breaking away after this fashion. For reasons no 
longer obvious they hankered specially towards 
Stamford or Northampton. Until quite recently, 
within living memory, all candidates for a Master- 
ship of Arts at Oxford had to promise never to 
lecture at Stamford. A flood here in 1520, which 
swept away Garret Hostel Bridge, put Cambridge 
in like mind and started a prophecy (to which you 
may find allusion in the fourth book of The Faerie 
Queene) that both Universities would meet in the 
end, and kiss, at Stamford. Each in turn broke 
away from Northampton, and the worthy Fuller 
(a Northamptonshire man) has recorded his 
wonder that so eligible a spot was not finally 
chosen. 

I have mentioned a flood: but the immediate 
cause of these migrations or attempted migrations 
were not usually respectable enough to rank with 
any such act of God. They started as a rule with 
some Town and Gown row, or some bloody affray 
between scholars of the North and of the South. 
Without diminishing your sense of the real fervour 
for learning which drew young men from the 



Literature in our Universities 249 

remotest parts of Europe to these centres, but 
having for my immediate object to make clear to 
you that, whatever these young men sought, it 
was not literature, I wish you first to have in your 
minds a vivid picture of what a university town 
was like, and what its students were like during 
the greater part of the 12th and 13th centuries; 
that is to say, after the first enthusiasm had died 
down, when Oxford or Cambridge had organised 
itself into a Studium Generate, or Universitas 
(which, of course, has nothing to do with Uni- 
versality, whether of teaching or of frequenting, 
but simply means a society. Universitas = all of 
us). 

To begin with, the town was of wood, often 
on fire in places ; with the alleviation of frequent 
winter floods, which in return, in the words of a 
modern poet, would "leave a lot of little things 
behind them." It requires but a small effort of 
the imagination in Cambridge to picture the streets 
as narrow, dark, almost meeting overhead in gables 
out of which the house slops would be discharged 
after casual warning down into a central gutter. 
That these narrow streets were populous with 
students remains certain, however much discount 
we allow on contemporary bills of reckoning. And 
the crowd was noisy. Men have always been 



250 On the Art of Writing 

ingenious in their ways of celebrating academical 
success. Pythagoras, for example, sacrificed an 
ox on solving the theorem numbered 47 in the 
first book of Euclid; and even to-day a professor 
in his solitary lodge may be encouraged to believe 
now and then, from certain evidences in the sky, 
that the spirit of Pythagoras is not dead but 
translated. 

But of the mediaeval University the lawlessness, 
though well attested, can scarcely !>e conceived. 
When in the streets "nation" drew the knife upon 
"nation," "town" upon "gown"; when the city 
bell started to answer the clang of St. Mary's; 
horrible deeds were done. I pass over massacres, 
tumults such as the famous one of St. Scholastica's 
Day at Oxford and choose one at a decent distance 
(yet entirely typical) exhumed from the annals of 
the University of Toulouse, in the year 1332. In 
that year 

Five brothers of the noble family de la Penne lived 
together in a Hospicium at Toulouse as students of the 
Civil and Canon Law. One of them was Provost of a 
Monastery, another Archdeacon of Albi, another an 
Archpriest, another Canon of Toledo. A bastard son 
of their father, named Peter, lived with them as squire 
to the Canon. On Easter Day, Peter, with another 
squire of the household named Aimery Beranger and 
other students, having dined at a tavern, were dancing 



Literature in our Universities 251 

with women, singing, shouting, and beating "metallic 
vessels and iron culinary instruments" in the street 
before their master's house. The Provost and the 
Archpriest were sympathetically watching the jovial 
scene from a window, until it was disturbed by the 
appearance of a Capitoul and his officers, who sum- 
moned some of the party to surrender the prohibited 
arms which they were wearing. "Ben Senhor, non 
fassat" was the impudent reply. The Capitoul at- 
tempted to arrest one of the offenders; whereupon 
the ecclesiastical party made a combined attack upon 
the official. Aimery Beranger struck him in the face 
with a poignard, cutting off his nose and part of his 
chin and lips, and knocking out or breaking no less 
than eleven teeth. The surgeons deposed that if he 
recovered (he eventually did recover) he would never 
be able to speak intelligibly. One of the watch was 
killed outright by Peter de la Penne. That night the 
murderer slept, just as if nothing had happened, in 
the house of his ecclesiastical masters. The whole 
household, masters and servants alike, were, how- 
ever, surprised by the other Capitouls and a crowd of 
200 citizens, and led off to prison, and the house is 
alleged to have been pillaged. The Archbishop's 
Official demanded their surrender. In the case of 
the superior ecclesiastics this, after a short delay, was 
granted. But Aimery, who dressed like a layman 
in "divided and striped clothes" and wore a long 
beard, they refused to treat as a clerk, though it was 
afterwards alleged that the tonsure was plainly dis- 
cernible upon his head until it was shaved by order 
of the Capitouls. Aimery was put to the torture, 
admitted his crime, and was sentenced to death. The 
sentence was carried out by hanging, after he had had 



252 On the Art of Writing 

his hand cut off on the scene of the crime, and been 
dragged by horses to the place of execution. The 
Capitouls were then excommunicated by the Official, 
and the ecclesiastical side of the quarrel was eventually 
transferred to the Roman Court. Before the Parle- 
ment of Paris the University complained of the viola- 
tion of the Royal privilege exempting scholars' servants 
from the ordinary tribunals. The Capitouls were 
imprisoned, and after long litigation sentenced to 
pay enormous damages to the ruffian's family and erect 
a chapel for the good of his soul. The city was 
condemned for a time to the forfeiture of all its privi- 
leges. The body was cut down from the gibbet on 
which it had been hanging for three years, and ac- 
corded a solemn funeral. Four Capitouls bore the pall, 
and all fathers of families were required to walk in the 
procession. When they came to the Schools, the citi- 
zens solemnly begged pardon of the University, and 
the cortege was joined by 5000 scholars. Finally, 
it cost the city 15,000 livres tournois or more to regain 
their civic privileges. 1 

The late Mr. Cecil Rhodes once summarised 
all Fellows of Colleges as children in matters of 
finance. Be that as it may, you will find nothing 
more constant in history than the talent of the 
universities for extracting money or money's worth 
out of a riot. Time (I speak as a parent) has 
scarcely blunted that faculty; and still — since 

1 Rashdall, The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, vol. ii, 
p. 684, from documents printed in Founder's collection. 



Literature in our Universities 253 

where young men congregate, noise there must 
be — our Universities like Wordsworth's Happy 
Warrior 

turn their necessity to glorious gain. 

These were the excesses of young ''bloods, " and 
their servants : but with them mingled scholars not 
less ferocious in their habits because almost de- 
sperately poor. You all know, I dare say, that 
very poor scholars would be granted licences to beg 
by the Chancellor. The sleeve of this gown in 
which I address you represents the purse or pocket 
of a Master of Arts, and may hint to you by its 
amplitude how many crusts he was prepared to 
receive from the charitable. 

Now, choosing to ignore (because it has been 
challenged as overpainted) a picture of penury 
endured by the scholars of St. John's College in 
this University, let me tell you two stories, one 
well attested, the other fiction if you will, but both 
agreeable as testifying to the spirit of youth which, 
ever blowing upon their sacred embers, has kept 
Oxford and Cambridge perennially alive. 

My first is of three scholars so poor that they 
possessed but one "cappa" and gown between 
them. They took it in turns therefore, and when 



254 On the Art of Writing 

one went to lecture the other two kept to their lodg- 
ings. I invite you even to reflect on the joy of the 
lucky one, in a winter lecture room, dark, with 
unglazed windows, as he listened and shuffled his 
feet for warmth in the straw of the floor. [No one, 
by the way, can understand the incessant harping 
of our early poets upon May-time and the return 
of summer until he has pictured to himself the dark 
and cold discomfort of a Middle-English winter.] 
These three poor scholars fed habitually on bread, 
with soup and a little wine, tasting meat only 
on Sundays and feasts of the Church. Yet one 
of them, Richard of Chichester, who lived to 
become a saint, saepe retulit quod nunquam in vita 
sua tamjucundam, tarn delectabilem duxerat vitam — 
that never had he lived so jollily, so delectably. 

That is youth, youth blessed by friendship. 
Now for my second story, which is also of youth 
and friendship. — 

Two poor scholars, who had with pains become 
Masters of Arts and saved their pence to purchase 
the coveted garb, on the afternoon of their admis- 
sion took a country walk in it, together flaunting 
their new finery. But, the day being gusty, on 
their return across the bridge, a puff of wind caught 
the biretta of one and blew it into the river. The 
loss was irrecoverable, since neither could swim. 



Literature in our Universities 255 

The poor fellow looked at his friend. His friend 
looked at him. "Between us two, " he said, "it is 
all or naught, " and cast his own cap to float and 
sink with the other down stream. 

You will never begin to understand literature 
until you understand something of life. These 
young men, your forerunners, understood some- 
thing of life while as yet completely careless of 
literature. After the impulse of Abelard and others 
had died down, the mass of students betook them- 
selves to the universities, no doubt, for quite 
ordinary, mercenary reasons. The University led 
to the Church, and the Church, in England at any 
rate, was the door to professional life. 

Nearly all the civil servants of the Crown — I 
am here quoting freely — the diplomatists, the 
secretaries or advisers of great nobles, the physi- 
cians, the architects, at one time the secular law- 
givers, all through the Middle Ages the then 
large tribe of ecclesiastical lawyers, were ecclesi- 
astics. . . . Clerkship did not necessarily involve 
even minor orders. But as it was cheaper to a 
king or a bishop or a temporal magnate to reward 
his physician, his legal adviser, his secretary, or 
his agent by a Canonry or a Rectory than by large 
salaries, the average student of Paris or Oxford 
or Cambridge looked toward the Church as the 



256 On the Art of Writing 

"main chance" as we say, and small blame to 
him! He never at any rate looked towards 
literature: nor did the universities, wise in their 
generation, encourage him to do anything of the 
sort. 

You may realise, Gentlemen, how tardily, even 
in later and more enlightened times, the study of 
Literature has crept its way into official Cam- 
bridge, if you will take down your University Calen- 
dar and study the list of professorships there set 
forth in order of foundation. It begins in 1502 
with the Lady Margaret's Chair of Divinity, 
founded by the mother of Henry VII. Five 
Regius Professorships follow: of Divinity, Civil 
Law, Physic, Hebrew, Greek, all of 1540. So 
Greek comes in upon the flush of the Renaissance ; 
and the Calendar bravely, yet not committing itself 
to a date, heads with Erasmus the noble roll which 
concludes (as may it long conclude) with Henry 
Jackson. But Greek comes in last of the five. 
Close on a hundred years elapse before the founda- 
tion of the next chair — it is of Arabic; and more 
than a hundred before we arrive at Mathematics. 
So Sir William Hamilton was not without his- 
torical excuse when he declared the study of 
Mathematics to be no part of the business of this 
University! Then follow Moral Philosophy (1683), 



Literature in our Universities 257 

Music (1684), Chemistry (1702), Astronomy 
(1704), Anatomy (1707), Modern History and 
more Arabic, with Botany (1724), Geology (1727), 
closely followed by Mr. Hulse's Christian Advo- 
cate, more Astronomy (1749), more Divinity 
(1777), Experimental Philosophy (1783): then in 
the nineteenth century more Law, more Medicine, 
Mineralogy, Archaeology, Political Economy, Pure 
Mathematics, Comparative Anatomy, Sanskrit 
and yet again more Law, before we arrive in 1869 
at a Chair of Latin. Faint yet pursuing, we have 
yet to pass chairs of Fine Art (belated), Experi- 
mental Physics, Applied Mechanics, Anglo-Saxon, 
Animal Morphology, Surgery, Physiology, Patho- 
logy, Ecclesiastical History, Chinese, more Divinity, 
Mental Philosophy, Ancient History, Agricul- 
ture, Biology, Agricultural Botany, more Biology, 
Astrophysics, and German, before arriving in 1910 
at a chair of English Literature which by this time 
I have no breath to defend. 

The enumeration has, I hope, been instructive. 
If it has also plunged you in gloom, to that atmos- 
phere (as the clock warns me) for a fortnight I 
must leave you: with a promise, however, in 
another lecture to cheer you, if it may be, with 

some broken gleams of hope. 

17 



XI 
English Literature in our Universities (II). 

We broke off, Gentlemen, upon the somewhat 
painful conclusion that our Universities were not 
founded for the study of literature, and tardily 
admitted it. The dates of our three literary chairs 
in Cambridge — I speak of our Western literature 
only, and omit Arabic, Sanskrit, and Chinese — 
clenched that conclusion for us. Greek in 1540, 
Latin not until 1869, English but three years ago — 
from the lesson of these intervals there is no getting 
away. 

Now I do not propose to dwell on the Renais- 
sance and how Greek came in: for a number of 
writers in our time have been busy with the Re- 
naissance, and have — I was going to say "over- 
written the subject, " but no — it is better to say 
that they have f ocussed the period so as to distort 
the general perspective at the cost of other periods 
which have earned less attention; the twelfth 
century, for example. At any rate their efforts, 

258 



Literature in our Universities 259 

with the amount they claim of your reading, 
absolve me from doing more than remind you 
that the Renaissance brought in the study of Greek, 
and Greek necessarily brought in the study of 
literature : since no man can read what the Greeks 
wrote and not have his eyes unsealed to what I 
have called a norm of human expression ; a guide to 
conduct, a standard to correct our efforts, whether 
in poetry, or in philosophy, or in art. For the 
rest, I need only quote to you Gibbon's magnifi- 
cent saying, that the Greek language gave a soul 
to the objects of sense and a body to the abstrac- 
tions of metaphysics. [May I add, in parenthesis, 
that, while no believer in compulsory Greek, hold- 
ing, indeed, that you can hardly reconcile learning 
with compulsion, and still more hardly force them 
to be compatibles, I subscribe with all my heart to 
Bagehot's shrewd saying, " while a knowledge of 
Greek and Latin is not necessary to a writer of 
English, he should at least have a firm conviction 
that those two languages existed/'] 

But, assuming you to know something of the 
Renaissance, and how it brought Greek into Oxford 
and Cambridge, I find that in the course of the 
argument two things fall to be said, and both to 
be said with some emphasis. 

In the first place, without officially acknowledg- 



260 On the Art of Writing 

ing their native tongue or its literature, our two 
Universities had no sooner acquired Greek than 
their members became immensely interested in 
English. Take, for one witness out of many, 
Gabriel Harvey, Fellow of Pembroke Hall. His 
letters to Edmund Spenser have been preserved, 
as you know. Now Gabriel Harvey was a man 
whom few will praise, and very few could have 
loved. Few will quarrel with Dr. Courthope's 
description of him as "a person of considerable 
intellectual force, but intolerably arrogant and 
conceited, and with a taste vitiated by all the affec- 
tations of Italian humanism," or deny that "his 
tone in his published correspondence with Spenser 
is that of an intellectual bully. " J None will refuse 
him the title of fool for attempting to mislead 
Spenser into writing hexameters. But all you can 
urge against Gabriel Harvey, on this count or that 
or the other, but accumulates proof that this 
donnish man was all the while giving thought — 
giving even ferocious thought — to the business of 
making an English Literature. 

Let me adduce more pleasing evidence. On 
or about Christmas, in the year 1597, there was 
enacted here in Cambridge, in the hall of St. John's 
College, a play called The Pilgrimage to Parnassus, 

1 Cambridge History of English Literature, vol. iii, p. 241. 



Literature in our Universities 261 

a skittish work, having for subject the "discontent 
of scholars"; the misery attending those who, 
unsupported by a private purse, would follow after 
poetry and culture. No one knows the author's 
name : but he had a wit which has kept something 
of its salt to this day, and in Christmas, 1597, it 
took Cambridge by storm. The public demanded 
a sequel, and The Return from Parnassus made its 
appearance on the following Christmas (again in 
St. John's College hall) ; to be followed by a Second 
Part of the Return from Parnassus, the author's 
overflow of wit, three years later. Of the popu- 
larity of the first and second plays — The Pilgrimage 
and The Return, Part I — we have good evi- 
dence in the prologue to The Return, Part II, 
where the author makes Momus say, before an 
audience which knew the truth : 

The Pilgrimage to Parnassus and The Returne from 
Parnassus have stood the honest Stagekeepers in 
many a crowne's expense for linckes and vizards: 
purchased many a Sophister a knocke with a clubbe : 
hindred the buttler's box, and emptied the Colledge 
barrells; and now, unlesse you have heard the former, 
you may returne home as wise as you came: for this 
last is the last part of The Returne from Parnassus; 
that is, the last time that the Author's wit will turne 
upon the toe in this vaine. 

In other words, these plays had set everybody 



262 On the Art of Writing 

in Cambridge agog, had been acted by link-light, 
had led to brawls — either between literary factions 
or through offensive personal allusions to which we 
have lost all clue — had swept into the box-office 
much money usually spent on Christmas gambling, 
and had set up an inappeasable thirst for College 
ale. The point for us is that (in 1 597-1601) they 
abound in topical allusions to the London theatres: 
that Shakespeare is obviously just as much a con- 
cern to these young men of Cambridge as Mr. 
Shaw (say) is to our young men to-day, and an 
allusion to him is dropped in confidence that it will 
be aptly taken. For instance, one of the char- 
acters, Gullio, will have some love-verses recited 
to him "in two or three diverse veins, in Chaucer's, 
Gower's and Spenser's and Mr. Shakespeare's." 
Having listened to Chaucer, he cries, "Tush! 
Chaucer is a foole"; but coming to some lines of 
Mr. Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, he cries, 
"Ey, marry, Sir! these have some life in them! 
Let this duncifled world esteeme of Spenser and 
Chaucer, I'le worship sweet Mr. Shakespeare, and to 
honoure him I will lay his Venus and Adonis under 
my pillowe." For another allusion — "Few of the 
University pen plaies well," says the actor Kempe 
in Part II of the Returne; "they smell too much 
of that writer Ovid and that writer Metamorphosis, 



Literature in our Universities 263 

and talke too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. 
Why here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all 
downe, ay and Ben Jonson, too." Here you 
have Cambridge assembling at Christmas-tide to 
laugh at well-understood hits upon the theatrical 
taste of London. Here you have, to make Cam- 
bridge laugh, three farcical quasi-Aristophanic 
plays all hinging on the tribulations of scholars 
who depart to pursue literature for a livelihood. 
For a piece of definite corroborative evidence you 
have a statute of Queens' College (quoted by Mr. 
Bass Mullinger) which directs that "any student 
refusing to take part in the acting of a comedy 
or tragedy in the College and absenting himself 
from the performance, contrary to the injunctions of 
the President, shall be expelled from the Society" 
— which seems drastic. And on top of all this, 
you have evidence enough and to spare of the part 
played in Elizabethan drama by the "University 
Wits." Why, Marlowe (of Corpus Christi) may 
be held to have invented its form — blank verse; 
Ben Jonson (of St. John's) to have carried it on 
past its meridian and through its decline, into the 
masque. Both Universities claim Lyly and Chap- 
man. Marston, Peel, Massinger, hailed from 
Oxford. But Greene and Nashe were of Cam- 
bridge — of St. John's both, and Day of Caius. 



264 On the Art of Writing 

They sought to London, and there (for tragic 
truth underlay that Christmas comedy of The 
Pilgrimage to Parnassus) many of them came 
to bitter ends: but before reaching their sordid 
personal ruin — and let the deaths of Marlowe and 
Greene be remembered — they built the Elizabethan 
drama, as some of them lived to add its last 
ornaments. We know what, meanwhile, Spenser 
had done. I think it scarcely needs further proof 
that Cambridge, towards the end of the sixteenth 
century, was fermenting with a desire to read, 
criticise, yes and write, English literature, albeit 
officially the University recognised no such thing. 
There remains a second question — How hap- 
pened it that Cambridge, after admitting Greek, 
took more than three hundred years to establish 
a Chair of Latin, and that a Chair of English is, so 
to speak, a mushroom (call it not toadstool!) of 
yesterday? Why simply enough. Latin contin- 
ued to be the working language of Science. In 
Latin Bacon naturally composed his Novum 
Organum and indeed almost all his scientific and 
philosophical work, although a central figure of his 
age among English prose-writers. In Latin, in the 
eighteenth century, Newton wrote his Principia: 
and I suppose that of no two books written by 
Englishmen before the close of that century, or 



Literature in our Universities 265 

indeed before Darwin's Origin of Species, can it be 
less extravagantly said than of the Novum Organ- 
um and the Principia that they shook the world. 
Now, without forgetting our Classical Tripos 
(founded in 1822), as without forgetting the great 
names of Bentley and Porson, we may observe it as 
generally true, that whenever and wherever large 
numbers of scientific men use a particular language 
as their working instrument, they have a disposition 
to look askance on its refinements; to be jealous 
of its literary professors; to accuse these of treating 
as an end in itself what is properly a means. Like 
the Texas editor I quoted to you in a previous 
lecture, these scientific workers want to "get 
there" in a hurry, forgetting that (to use another 
Americanism) the sharper the chisel the more ice 
it is likely to cut. You may observe this disposi- 
tion — this suspicion of "literature," this thinly 
veiled contempt — in many a scientific man to-day; 
though because his language has changed from 
Latin to English, it is English he now chooses to 
cheapen. Well, we cannot help it, perhaps. 
Perhaps he cannot help it. It is human nature. 
We must go on persuading him, not losing our 
tempers. 

None the less we should not shut our eyes to 
the fact that while a language is the working 



266 On the Art of Writing 

instrument of scientific men there will always be a 
number of them to decry any study of it for its 
beauty, and even any study of it for the sake 
of accuracy — its beauty and its accuracy being 
indeed scarcely distinguishable. 

I fear, Gentlemen, you may go on from this to 
the dreadful conclusion that the date 1869, when 
Cambridge at length came to possess a Chair of 
Latin, marks definitely the hour at which Latin 
closed its eyes and became a dead language ; that 
you may proceed to a yet more dreadful appli- 
cation of this to the Chair of English founded in 
1 910: and that henceforward (to misquote what 
Mr. Max Beerbohm once wickedly said of Walter 
Pater) you will be apt to regard Professor Hous- 
man and me as two widowers engaged, while the 
undertaker waits, in composing the features of our 
beloveds. 

But (to speak seriously) that is what I stand 
here to controvert: and I derive no small encour- 
agement when — as has more than once happened — 
A, a scientific man, comes to me and complains 
that he for his part cannot understand B, another 
scientific man, "because the fellow can't express 
himself. " And the need to study precision in 
writing has grown far more instant since men of 
science have abandoned the "universal language" 



Literature in our Universities 267 

and taken to writing in their own tongues. Let us, 
while not on the whole regretting the change, at 
least recognise some dangers, some possible dis- 
advantages. I will confine myself to English, con- 
sidered as a substitute for Latin. In Latin you 
have a language which may be thin in its vocabulary 
and inelastic for modern use; but a language which 
at all events compels a man to clear his thought 
and communicate it to other men precisely. 

Thoughts hardly to be packed 
Into the narrow act 

— may be all impossible of compression into the 
Latin speech. In English, on the other hand, you 
have a language which by its very copiousness and 
elasticity tempts you to believe that you can do 
without packing, without compression, arrange- 
ment, order; that, with the Texas editor, all you 
need is to "get there" — though it be with all your 
intellectual belongings in a jumble, overflowing the 
portmanteau. Rather I preach to you that hav- 
ing proudly inherited English with its copia fandi, 
you should keep your estate in order by con- 
stantly applying to it that jus et norma loauendi 
of which, if you seek to the great models, you will 
likewise find yourselves inheritors. 

"But, " it is sometimes urged, "why not leave tnis 
new study of English to the younger universities 



268 On the Art of Writing 

now being set up all over the country ?" "Ours 
is an age of specialising. Let these newcomers 
have something — what better than English? — to 
specialise upon." 

I might respond by asking if the fame of Cam- 
bridge would stand where it stands to-day had she 
followed a like counsel concerning other studies 
and, resting upon Mathematics, given over this or 
that branch of Natural Science to be grasped by 
new hands. What of Electricity, for example? 
Or what of Physiology? Yes, and among the 
unnatural sciences, what of Political Economy? 
But I will use a more philosophical argument. 

Some years ago I happened on a collection of 
Bulgarian proverbs of which my memory retains 
but two, yet each an abiding joy. In a lecture 
on English Literature in our Universities you will 
certainly not miss to apply the first, which runs, 
"Many an ass has entered Jerusalem. " 

The application of the second may elude you for 
a moment. It voices the impatience of an honest 
Bulgar who has been worried overmuch to sub- 
scribe to what, in this England of ours, we call 
Church Purposes; and it runs, "All these two- 
penny saints will be the ruin of the Church. " 

Now far be it from me to apply the term "two- 
penny saint" to any existing university. To 



Literature in our Universities 269 

avoid the accusation I hereby solemnly declare 
my deep conviction that every single university 
at this moment in England, Scotland, Wales, or 
Ireland has reasons — strong in all, in some over- 
whelmingly strong — for its existence. That is 
plainly said, I hope? Yet I do maintain that if 
we go on multiplying universities we shall not 
increase the joy ; that the reign of two-penny saints 
lies not far off and will soon lie within measurable 
distance; and that it will be a pestilent reign. As 
we saw in our last lecture the word "university" 
— universitas — had, in its origin, nothing to do with 
universality: it meant no more than a society, 
organized (as it happened) to promote learning. 
But words, like institutions, often rise above their 
beginnings, and in time acquire a proud secondary 
connotation. For an instance let me give you the 
beautiful Wykehamist motto, Manners Makyth 
Man, wherein "manners" originally meant no 
more than "morals. " So there has grown around 
our two great Universities of Oxford and Cambridge 
a connotation (secondary, if you will, but valuable 
above price) of universality ; of standing like great 
beacons of light, to attract the young wings of all 
who would seek learning for their sustenance. 
Thousands have singed, thousands have burned 
themselves, no doubt: but what thousands of 



270 On the Art of Writing 

thousands have caught the sacred fire into their 
souls as they passed through and passed out, to 
carry it, to drop it, still as from wings, upon waste 
places of the world! Think of country vicarages, 
of Australian or Himalayan outposts, where men 
have nourished out lives of duty upon the fire of 
three transient, priceless years. Think of the 
generations of children to whom their fathers' lives, 
prosaic enough, could always be re-illumined if 
someone let fall the word "Oxford" or "Cam- 
bridge, " so that they themselves came to surmise 
an aura about the name as of a land very far off; 
and then say if the ineffable spell of those two words 
do not lie somewhere in the conflux of generous 
youth with its rivalries and clash of minds, ere 
it disperses, generation after generation, to the 
duller business of life. Would you have your 
mother University, Gentlemen, undecorated by 
some true study of your mother-English ? 

I think not, having been there, and known such 
thoughts as you will carry away, and having been 
against expectation called back to report them. 

And sometimes I remember days of old 
When fellowship seem'd not so far to seek, 
And all the world and I seem'd far less cold, 
And at the rainbow's foot lay surely gold, 
And hope was strong, and life itself not weak. 






Literature in our Universities 271 

My purpose here (and I cannot too often recur 
to it) is to wean your minds from hankering after 
false Germanic standards and persuade you, or at 
least point out to you, in what direction that true 
study lies if you are men enough to take up your 
inheritance and believe in it as a glory to be 
improved. 

Neither Oxford nor Cambridge nor any univer- 
sity on earth can study English Literature truth- 
fully or worthily, or even at all profitably, unless by 
studying it in the category for which Heaven, or 
Nature (call the ultimate cause what you will), 
intended it; or, to put the assertion more con- 
cretely, in any other category than that for which 
the particular author — be his name Chaucer or 
Chesterton, Shakespeare or Shaw — designed it ; as 
neither can Oxford nor Cambridge nor any univer- 
sity study English Literature, to understand it, 
unless by bracing itself to consider a living art. 
Origins, roots, all the gropings towards light — -let 
these be granted as accessories; let those who 
search in them be granted all honour, all respect. 
It is only when they preach or teach these pre- 
liminaries, these accessories, to be more important 
than Literature itself- — it is only when they, owing 
all their excuse in life to the established daylight, 
din upon us that the precedent darkness claims 



272 On the Art of Writing 

precedence in honour, that one is driven to utter 
upon them this dialogue, in monosyllables: 

And God said, "Let there be light": and there was 
light. 

"Oh, thank you, Sir," said the Bat and the Owl; 
"then we are off I " 

I grant you, Gentlemen, that there must always 
inhere a difficulty in correlating for the purposes of 
a Tripos a study of Literature itself with a study of 
these accessories; the thing itself being naturally 
so much more difficult: being so difficult indeed 
that (to take literary criticism alone and leave for a 
moment the actual practice of writing out of the 
question) though some of the first intellects in the 
world — Aristotle, Longinus, Quintilian, Boileau, 
Dryden, Lessing, Goethe, Coleridge, Sainte-Beuve 
— have broken into parcels of that territory, the 
mass of it remains unexplored, and nobody as yet 
has found courage to reduce the reports of these 
great explorers to any system; so that a very emi- 
nent person indeed found it easy to write to me the 
other day, "The principles of Criticism? What 
are they? Who made them?" To this I could 
only answer that I did not know Who made them; 
but that Aristotle, Dryden, Lessing, had, as it was 
credibly reported, discovered five, or, it might be, 






Literature in our Universities 273 

six. And this difficulty of appraising literature 
absolutely inheres in your study of it from the 
beginning. No one can have set a General Paper 
on Literature and examined on it, setting it and 
marking the written answers, alongside of papers 
about language, inflexions, and the rest, without 
having borne in upon him that here the student 
finds his difficulty. While in a paper set about 
inflexions, etc., a pupil with a moderately retentive 
memory will easily obtain sixty or seventy per 
cent, of the total marks, in a paper on the book or 
play considered critically an examiner, "even after 
setting his paper with a view to some certain in- 
feriority of average, has to be lenient before he can 
award fifty, forty, or even thirty per cent, of the 
total. 

You will find a somewhat illuminating passage 
— illuminating, that is, if you choose to interpret 
and apply it to our subject — in Lucian's True 
History, where the veracious traveller, who tells 
the tale, affirms that he visited Hades among 
other places, and had some conversation with 
Homer, among its many inhabitants. — 

Before many days had passed, I accosted the poet 
Homer, when we were both disengaged, and asked him, 
among other things, where he came from ; it was still a 
18 



274 On the Art of Writing 

burning question with us, I explained. He said he was 
aware that some derived him from Chios, others from 
Smyrna, and others again from Colophon ; but in fact 
he was a Babylonian, generally known not as Homer 
but as Tigranes ; but when later in life he was given as 
a homer or hostage to the Greeks, that name clung to 
him. Another of my questions was about the so-called 
spurious books; had he written them or not? He 
said that they were all genuine : so I now knew what to 
think of the critics Zenodotus and Aristarchus and all 
their lucubrations. Having got a categorical answer 
on that point, I tried him next on his reason for start- 
ing the Iliad with the wrath of Achilles. He said 
he had no exquisite reason; it just came into his head 
that way. 

Even so diverse are the questions that may be 
asked concerning any great work of art. But to 
discover its full intent is always the most difficult 
task of all. That task, however, and nothing less 
difficult, will always be the one worthiest of a great 
university. 

On that, and on that alone, Gentlemen, do 
I base all claims for our School of English Litera- 
ture. And yet in conclusion I will ask you, 
reminding yourselves how fortunate is your lot in 
Cambridge, to think of fellow-Englishmen far less 
fortunate. 

Years ago I took some pains to examine the 
examination papers set by a renowned Examining 



Literature in our Universities 275 

Body and I found this — "I humbly solicit" (to use 
a phrase of Lucian's) "my hearers' incredulity" — 
that in a paper set upon three Acts of Hamlet — 
three Acts of Hamlet!— the first question started 
with "G.tt. p..cha" "AL.g.tor" and invited the 
candidate to fill in the missing letters correctly. 
Now I was morally certain that the words "gutta- 
percha" and "alligator" did not occur in the first 
three Acts of Hamlet; but having carefully re-read 
them I invited this examining body to explain 
itself. The answer I got was that, to understand 
Shakespeare, a student must first understand 
the English Language! Some of you on leaving 
Cambridge will go out — a company of Christian 
folk dispersed throughout the world — to tell 
English children of English Literature. Such 
are the pedagogic fetters you will have to knock 
off their young minds before they can stand and 
walk. 

Gentlemen, on a day early in this term I sought 
the mound which is the old Castle of Cambridge. 
Access to it, as perhaps you know, lies through the 
precincts of the County Prison. An iron railing 
encloses the mound, having a small gate, for the 
key of which a notice-board advised me to ring 
the prison bell. I rang. A very courteous gaoler 
answered the bell and opened the gate, which 



276 On the Art of Writing 

stands just against his wicket. I thanked him, but 
could not forbear asking, "Why do they keep this 
gate closed?" "I don't know, sir," he answered, 
"but I suppose if they didn't the children might 
get in and play." 

So with his answer I went up the hill and 
from the top saw Cambridge spread at my feet; 
Magdalene below me, and the bridge which — poor 
product as it is of the municipal taste — has given 
its name to so many bridges all over the world ; the 
river on its long ambit to Chesterton; the tower 
of St. John's, and beyond it the unpretentious 
but more beautiful tower of Jesus College. To my 
right the magnificent chine of King's College 
Chapel made its own horizon above the yellowing 
elms. I looked down on the streets — the narrow 
streets — the very streets which, a fortnight ago, I 
tried to people for you with that mediaeval throng 
which has passed as we shall pass. Still in my ear 
the gaoler's answer repeated itself — "I suppose, if 
they didn't keep it locked, the children might get in 
and play": and a broken echo seemed to take it up, 
in words that for a while had no more coherence 
than the scattered jangle of bells in the town 
below. But as I turned to leave, they chimed 
into an articulate sentence and the voice was the 
voice of Francis Bacon — Regnum Scientiae ut reg- 



Literature in our Universities 277 

num Coeli non nisi sub persona infantis intratur. — 
Into the Kingdom of Knowledge, as into the Kingdom 
of Heaven, whoso would enter must become as a little 
child. 



XII 
On Style 

Should Providence, Gentlemen, destine any one 
of you to write books for his living, he will find 
experimentally true what I here promise him, that 
few pleasures sooner cloy than reading what the 
reviewers say. This promise I hand on with the 
better confidence since it was endorsed for me once 
in conversation by that eminently good man the 
late Henry Sidgwick; who added, however, "Per- 
haps I ought to make a single exception. There 
was a critic who called one of my books 'epoch- 
making. ' Being anonymous, he would have 
been hard to find and thank, perhaps ; but I ought 
to have made the effort. " 

May I follow up this experience of his with one 
of my own, as a preface or brief apology for this 
lecture? Short-lived as is the author's joy in his 
critics, far-spent as may be his hope of fame, 
mournful his consent with Sir Thomas Browne 
that "there is nothing immortal but immortality, " 

278 



On Style 279 

he cannot hide from certain sanguine men of busi- 
ness, who in England call themselves 'Tress- 
Cutting Agencies," in America "Press-Clipping 
Bureaus," and, as each successive child of his 
invention comes to birth, unbecomingly presume 
in him an almost virginal trepidation. "Your 
book, " they write falsely, "is exciting much com- 
ment. May we collect and send you notices of it 
appearing in the World's Press? We submit a speci- 
men cutting with our terms ; and are, dear Sir, " etc. 
Now, although steadily unresponsive to this 
wile, I am sometimes guilty of taking the enclosed 
specimen review and thrusting it for preservation 
among the scarcely less deciduous leaves of the 
book it was written to appraise. So it happened 
that having this vacation, to dust — not to read — 
a line of obsolete or obsolescent works on a shelf, 
I happened on a review signed by no smaller a 
man than Mr. Gilbert Chesterton and informing 
the world that the author of my obsolete book was 
full of good stories as a kindly uncle, but had a 
careless or impatient way of stopping short and 
leaving his readers to guess what they most wanted 
to know: that, reaching the last chapter, or what 
he chose to make the last chapter, instead of wind- 
ing up and telling "how everybody lived ever 
after, " he (so to speak) slid you off his avuncular 



280 On the Art of Writing 

knee with a blessing and the remark that nine 
o'clock was striking and all good children should 
be in their beds. 

That criticism has haunted me during the 
vacation. Looking back on a course of lectures 
which I deemed to be accomplished; correcting 
them in print ; revising them with all the nervous- 
ness of a beginner; I have seemed to hear you 
complain — "He has exhorted us to write accu- 
rately, appropriately; to eschew Jargon; to be bold 
and essay Verse. He has insisted that Literature 
is a living art, to be practised. But just what we 
most needed he has not told. At the final door- 
way to the secret he turned his back and left us. 
Accuracy, propriety, perspicuity — these we 
may achieve. But where has he helped us to 
write with beauty, with charm, with distinction? 
Where has he given us rules for what is called 
Style in short? — having attained which an author 
may count himself set up in business. " 

Thus, Gentlemen, with my mind's ear I heard 
you reproaching me. I beg you to accept what 
follows for my apology. 

To begin with, let me plead that you have been 
told of one or two things which Style is not; which 
have little or nothing to do with Style, though 
sometimes vulgarly mistaken for it. Style, for 



On Style 281 

example, is not — can never be — extraneous Orna- 
ment. You remember, may be, the Persian lover 
whom I quoted to you out of Newman: how to 
convey his passion he sought a professional letter- 
writer and purchased a vocabulary charged with 
ornament, wherewith to attract the fair one as 
with a basket of jewels. Well, in this extraneous, 
professional, purchased ornamentation, you have 
something which Style is not: and if you here 
require a practical rule of me, I will present you 
with this: " Whenever you feel an impulse to per- 
petrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey 
it — whole-heartedly — and delete it before sending 
your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings. " 

But let me plead further that you have not been 
left altogether without clue to the secret of what 
Style is. That you must master the secret for 
yourselves lay implicit in our bargain, and you 
were never promised that a writer's training would 
be easy. Yet a clue was certainly put in your 
hands when, having insisted that Literature is a 
living art, I added that therefore it must be per- 
sonal and of its essence personal. 

This goes very deep: it conditions all our 
criticism of art. Yet it conceals no mystery. 
You may see its meaning most easily and clearly, 
perhaps, by contrasting Science and Art at their 



282 On the Art of Writing 

two extremes — say Pure Mathematics with Acting. 
Science as a rule deals with things, Art with 
man's thought and emotion about things. In Pure 
Mathematics things are rarefied into ideas, num- 
bers, concepts, but still farther and farther away 
from the individual man. Two and two make 
four, and fourpence is not ninepence (or at any 
rate four is not nine) whether Alcibiades or Cleon 
keep the tally. In Acting on the other hand 
almost everything depends on personal inter- 
pretation — on the gesture, the walk, the gaze, the 
tone of a Siddons, the ruse smile of a Coquelin, 
the exquisite, vibrant intonation of a Bernhardt. 
" English Art?" exclaimed Whistler, "there is no 
such thing ! Art is art and mathematics is mathe- 
matics. " Whistler erred. Precisely because Art 
is Art, and Mathematics is Mathematics and a 
Science, Art being Art can be English or French; 
and, more than this, must be the personal expres- 
sion of an Englishman or a Frenchman, as a 
"Constable" differs froma "Corot" anda "Whist- 
ler" from both. Surely I need not labour this. 
But what is true of the extremes of Art and 
Science is true also, though sometimes less recognis- 
ably true, of the mean : and where they meet and 
seem to conflict (as in History) the impact is that 
of the personal or individual mind upon universal 



On Style 283 

truth, and the question becomes whether what 
happened in the Sicilian Expedition, or at the trial 
of Charles I, can be set forth naked as an alge- 
braical sum, serene in its certainty, indifferent 
to opinion, uncoloured in the telling as in the 
hearing by sympathy or dislike, by passion or by 
character. I doubt, while we should strive in his- 
tory as in all things to be fair, if history can be 
written in that colourless way, to interest men in 
human doings. I am sure that nothing which lies 
further towards imaginative, creative Art can be 
written in that way. 

It follows then that Literature, being by its 
nature personal, must be by its nature almost 
infinitely various. "Two persons cannot be the 
authors of the sounds which strike our ear; and 
as they cannot be speaking one and the same 
speech, neither can they be writing one and the 
same lecture or discourse. " Quot homines tot sen- 
tentiae. You may translate that, if you will, 
"Every man of us constructs his sentences differ- 
ently" ; and if there be indeed any quarrel between 
Literature and Science (as I never can see why 
there should be), I for one will readily grant Science 
all her cold superiority, her ease in Sion with 
universal facts, so it be mine to serve among the 
multifarious race who have to adjust, as best they 



284 On the Art of Writing 

may, Science's cold conclusions (and much else) to 
the brotherly give-and-take of human life. 

Quicquid agunt homines, voturn, tirnor, ira, volup- 
tas . . . Is it possible, Gentlemen, that you can 
have read one, two, three, or more of the acknow- 
ledged masterpieces of literature without having 
it borne in on you that they are great because 
they are alive, and traffic not with cold celestial 
certainties, but with men's hopes, aspirations, 
doubts, loves, hates, breakings of the heart; the 
glory and vanity of human endeavour, the tran- 
sience of beauty, the capricious uncertain lease on 
which you and I hold life, the dark coast to which 
we inevitably steer; all that amuses or vexes, 
all that gladdens, saddens, maddens us men and 
women on this brief and mutable traject which 
yet must be home for a while, the anchorage of our 
hearts? For an instance: — 

Here lies a most beautiful lady, 
Light of step and heart was she: 

I think she was the most beautiful lady 
That ever was in the West Country. 

But beauty vanishes, beauty passes, 

However rare, rare it be; 
And when I crumble who shall remember 

That lady of the West Country? 1 

1 Walter de la Mare. 



On Style 285 

Or take a critic — a literary critic — such as Samuel 
Johnson, of whom we are used to think as of a man 
artificial in phrase and pedantic in judgment. He 
lives, and why? Because, if you test his criticism, 
he never saw literature but as a part of life, nor 
would allow in literature what was false to life, as 
he saw it. He could be wrong-headed, perverse; 
could damn Milton because he hated Milton's 
politics; on any question of passion or prejudice 
could make injustice his daily food. But he 
could not, even in a friend's epitaph, let pass a 
phrase (however well turned) which struck him as 
empty of life or false to it. All Boswell testifies 
to this: and this is why Samuel Johnson survives. 

Now let me carry this contention — that all 
Literature is personal and therefore various — 
into a field much exploited by the pedant, and 
fenced about with many notice-boards and public 
warnings. "Neologisms not allowed here." "All 
persons using slang, or trespassing in pursuit of 
originality. ..." 

Well, I answer these notice-boards by saying 
that, literature being personal, and men various — 
and even the Oxford English Dictionary being 
no Canonical book — man's use or defiance of the 
dictionary depends for its justification on nothing 



286 On the Art of Writing 

but his success : adding that, since it takes all kinds 
to make a world, or a literature, his success will 
probably depend on the occasion. A few months 
ago I found myself seated at a bump-supper next 
to a cheerful youth who, towards the close, sug- 
gested thoughtfully, as I arose to make a speech, 
that, the bonfire (which of course he called the 
"bonner") being due at nine- thirty o'clock, there 
was little more than bare time left for "langers and 
godders. " It cost me, who think slowly, some 
seconds to interpret that by "langers" he meant 
"Auld Lang Syne" and by "godders" "God 
Save the King. " I thought at the time, and still 
think, and will maintain against any schoolmaster, 
that the neologisms of my young neighbour, though 
not to be recommended for essays or sermons, did 
admirably suit the time, place, and occasion. 

Seeing that in human discourse, infinitely varied 
as it is, so much must ever depend on who speaks, 
and to whom, in what mood and upon what occa- 
sion; and seeing that Literature must needs take 
account of all manner of writers, audiences, moods, 
occasions; I hold it a sin against the light to put up 
a warning against any word that comes to us in the 
fairway of use and wont (as "wire," for instance, 
for a telegram), even as surely as we should warn 
off hybrids or deliberately pedantic impostors, 



On Style 287 

such as " antibody " and "picture-drome"; and 
that, generally, it is better to err on the side of 
liberty than on the side of the censor: since by the 
manumitting of new words we infuse new blood 
into a tongue of which (or we have learnt nothing 
from Shakespeare's audacity) our first pride should 
be that it is flexible, alive, capable of responding to 
new demands of man's untiring quest after know- 
ledge and experience. Not because it was an ugly 
thing did I denounce Jargon to you, the other day : 
but because it was a dead thing, leading no- 
whither, meaning naught. There is wickedness 
in human speech, sometimes. You will detect 
it all the better for having ruled out what is 
naughty. 

Let us err, then, if we err, on the side of liberty. 
I came, the other day, upon this passage in Mr. 
Frank Harris's study of "The Man Shakes- 
peare": — 



In the last hundred years the language of Moliere 
has grown fourfold; the slang of the studios and the 
gutter and the laboratory, of the engineering school 
and the dissecting table, has been ransacked for 
special terms to enrich and strengthen the language in 
order that it may deal easily with the new thoughts. 
French is now a superb instrument, while English is 
positively poorer than it was in the time of Shake- 



288 On the Art of Writing 

speare, thanks to the prudery of our illiterate middle 
class. z 

Well, let us not lose our heads over this, any 
more than over other prophecies of our national 
decadence. The Oxford English Dictionary has 
not yet unfolded the last of its coils, which yet are 
ample enough to enfold us in seven words for every 
three an active man can grapple with. Yet the 
warning has point, and a particular point, for those 
who aspire to write poetry: as Francis Thompson 
has noted in his Essay on Shelley: — 

Theoretically, of course, one ought always to try 
for the best word. But practically, the habit of 
excessive care in word-selection frequently results in 
loss of spontaneity; and, still worse, the habit of 
always taking the best word too easily becomes the 
habit of always taking the most ornate word, the 
word most removed from ordinary speech. In con- 
quence of this, poetic diction has become latterly a 
kaleidoscope, and one's chief curiosity is as to the 
precise combinations into which the pieces will be 
shifted. There is, in fact, a certain band of words, the* 
Praetorian cohorts of Poetry, whose prescriptive aid is 
invoked by every aspirant to the poetic purple. . . . 
Against these it is time some banner should be raised. 

1 "An oration, " says Quintilian, "may find room for almost any 
word saving a few indecent ones {quae sunt parum verecunda) ." 
He adds that writers of the Old Comedy were often commended 
even for these: "but it is enough for us to mind our present 
business — sed nobis nostrum opus intueri sat est. " 



On Style 289 

. . . It is at any rate curious to note that the literary 
revolution against the despotic diction of Pope seems 
issuing, like political revolutions, in a despotism of his 
own making; 

and he adds a note that this is the more surprising 
to him because so many Victorian poets were prose- 
writers as well. 

Now, according to our theory, the practice of prose 
should maintain fresh and comprehensive a poet's 
diction, should save him from falling into the hands 
of an exclusive coterie of poetic words. It should 
react upon his metrical vocabulary to its beneficial 
expansion, by taking him outside his aristocratic circle 
of language, and keeping him in touch with the great 
commonalty, the proletariat of speech. For it is 
with words as with men : constant intermarriage within 
the limits of a patrician clan begets effete refinement; 
and to reinvigorate the stock, its veins must be re- 
plenished from hardy plebeian blood. 

In diction, then, let us acquire all the store we 
can, rejecting no coin for its minting but only if 
its metal be base. So shall we bring out of our 
treasuries new things and old. 

Diction, however, is but a part of Style, and 
perhaps not the most important part. So I revert 
to the larger question, "What is Style? What its 
xb ii >Jv etvai, its essence, the law of its being?" 

Now, as I sat down to write this lecture, me- 
19 



290 On the Art of Writing 

mory evoked a scene and with the scene a chance 
word of boyish slang, both of which may seem to 
you irrelevant until, or unless, I can make you feel 
how they hold for me the heart of the matter. 
I once happened to be standing in a corner of a 
ball-room when there entered the most beautiful 
girl these eyes have ever seen or now — since they 
grow dull — ever will see. It was, I believe, her 
first ball, and by some freak or in some premoni- 
tion she wore black : and not pearls — which, I am 
told, maidens are wont to wear on these occasions 
— but one crescent of diamonds in her black hair. 
Et vera incessu patuit dea. Here, I say, was 
absolute beauty. It startled. 

I think she was the most beautiful lady 

That ever was in the West Country. 
But beauty vanishes, beauty passes. . . . 

She died a year or two later. She may have been 
too beautiful to live long. I have a thought that 
she may also have been too good. 

For I saw her with the crowd about her: I saw 
led up and presented among others the man who 
was to be, for a few months, her husband: and 
then, as the men bowed, pencilling on their pro- 
grammes, over their shoulders I saw her eyes travel 
to an awkward young naval cadet (Do you 



On Style 291 

remember Cross jay in Meredith's The Egoist? 
It was just such a boy) who sat abashed and 
glowering sulkily beside me on the far bench. 
Promptly with a laugh, she advanced, claimed 
him, and swept him off into the first waltz. 

When it was over he came back, a trifle flushed, 
and I felicitated him; my remark (which I forget) 
being no doubt "just the sort of banality, you 
know, one does come out with" — as maybe that 
the British Navy kept its old knack of cutting out. 
But he looked at me almost in tears and blurted, 
"It isn't her beauty, sir. You saw? It's — it's — 
my God, it's the style!" 

Now you may think that a somewhat cheap, 
or at any rate inadequate, cry of the heart in my 
young seaman; as you may think it inadequate 
in me, and moreover a trifle capricious, to assure 
you (as I do) that the first and last secret of a good 
Style consists in thinking with the heart as well as 
with the head. 

But let us philosophise a little. You have been 
told, I daresay often enough, that the business of 
writing demands two — the author and the reader. 
Add to this what is equally obvious, that the 
obligation of courtesy rests first with the author, 
who invites the seance, and commonly charges for 
it. What follows, but that in speaking or writing 



292 On the Art of Writing 

we have an obligation to put ourselves into the 
hearer's or reader's place? It is his comfort, his 
convenience, we have to consult. To express our- 
selves is a very small part of the business: very- 
small and almost unimportant as compared with 
impressing ourselves : the aim of the whole process 
being to persuade. 

All reading demands an effort. The energy, the 
good-will which a reader brings to the book is, and 
must be, partly expended in the labour of reading, 
marking, learning, inwardly digesting what the 
author means. The more difficulties, then, we 
authors obtrude on him by obscure or careless 
writing, the more we blunt the edge of his atten- 
tion: so that if only in our own interest — though 
I had rather keep it on the ground of courtesy — we 
should study to anticipate his comfort. 

But let me go a little deeper. You all know 
that a great part of Lessing's argument in his 
Laokoon, on the essentials of Literature as opposed 
to Pictorial Art or Sculpture, depends on this — 
that in Pictorial Art or in Sculpture the eye sees, 
the mind apprehends, the whole in a moment 
of time, with the correspondent disadvantage that 
this moment of time is fixed and stationary ; where- 
as in writing, whether in prose or in verse, we can 
only produce our effect by a series of successive 



On Style 293 

small impressions, dripping our meaning (so to 
speak) into the reader's mind — with the corre- 
spondent advantage, in point of vivacity, that our 
picture keeps moving all the while. Now ob- 
viously this throws a greater strain on his pa- 
tience whom we address. Man at the best is a 
narrow-mouthed bottle. Through the conduit 
of speech he can utter — as you, my hearers, can 
receive— only one word at a time. In writing (as 
my old friend Professor Minto used to say) you are 
as a commander filing out his battalion through a 
narrow gate that allows only one man at a time to 
pass; and your reader, as he receives the troops, 
has to reform and reconstruct them. No matter 
how large or how involved the subject, it can be 
communicated only in that way. You see, then, 
what an obligation we owe to him of order and 
arrangement; and why, apart from felicities and 
curiosities of diction, the old rhetoricians laid 
such stress upon order and arrangement as duties 
we owe to those who honour us with their atten- 
tion. "La clarte," says a French writer, "est la 
politesse." Xdptct ko\ aa<pTqvefa 6ve, recommends 
Lucian. Pay your sacrifice to the Graces, and to 
aacp^veia — Clarity — first among the Graces. 

What am I urging? "That Style in writing 
is much the same thing as good manners in other 



294 On the Art of Writing 

human intercourse?" Well, and why not? At 
all events we have reached a point where Buffon's 
often-quoted saying that "Style is the man him- 
self" touches and coincides with William of Wyke- 
ham's old motto that "Manners makyth Man"; 
and before you condemn my doctrine as inade- 
quate listen to this from Coventry Patmore, still 
bearing in mind that a writer's main object is to 
impress his thought or vision upon his hearer. 

"There is nothing comparable for moral force to 
the charm of truly noble manners. ..." 

I grant you, to be sure, that the claim to possess 
a Style must be conceded to many writers — Carlyle 
is one — who take no care to put listeners at their 
ease, but rely rather on native force of genius to 
shock and astound. Nor will I grudge them your 
admiration. But I do say that, as more and more 
you grow to value truth and the modest grace of 
truth, it is less and less to such writers that you will 
turn: and I say even more confidently that the 
qualities of Style we allow them are not the 
qualities we should seek as a norm, for they one 
and all offend against Art's true maxim of avoiding 
excess. 

And this brings me to the two great paradoxes 
of Style. For the first (i), — although Style is so 
curiously personal and individual, and although 



On Style 295 

men are so variously built that no two in the world 
carry away the same impressions from a show, 
there is always a norm somewhere; in literature 
and art, as in morality. Yes, even in man's most 
terrific, most potent inventions — when, for exam- 
ple, in Hamlet or Lear Shakespeare seems to be 
breaking up the solid earth under our feet — there is 
always some point and standard of sanity — a Kent 
or an Horatio — to which all enormities and passion- 
ate errors may be referred ; to which the agitated 
mind of the spectator settles back as upon its 
centre of gravity, its pivot of repose. 

(2) The second paradox, though it is equally 
true, you may find a little subtler. Yet it but 
applies to Art the simple truth of the Gospel, that 
he who would save his soul must first lose it. 
Though personality pervades Style and cannot be 
escaped, the first sin against Style as against 
good Manners is to obtrude or exploit personality. 
The very greatest work in Literature — the Iliad, 
the Odyssey, the Purgatorio, The Tempest, Paradise 
Lost, the Republic, Don Quixote — is all 

Seraphically free 
From taint of personality. 

And Flaubert, that gladiator among artists, 
held that, at its highest, literary art could be 



296 On the Art of Writing 

carried into pure science. "I believe," said he, 
"that great art is scientific and impersonal. You 
should by an intellectual effort transport yourself 
into characters, not draw them into yourself. That 
at least is the method." On the other hand, says 
Goethe, "We should endeavour to use words 
that correspond as closely as possible with what we 
feel, see, think, imagine, experience, and reason. 
It is an endeavour we cannot evade and must daily 
renew." I call Flaubert's the better counsel, 
even though I have spent a part of this lecture in 
attempting to prove it impossible. It at least 
is noble, encouraging us to what is difficult. The 
shrewder Goethe encourages us to exploit our- 
selves to the top of our bent. I think Flaubert 
would have hit the mark if for "impersonal" he 
had substituted "disinterested." 

For — believe me, Gentlemen — so far as Handel 
stands above Chopin, as Velasquez above Greuze, 
even so far stand the great masculine objective 
writers above all who appeal to you by parade of 
personality or private sentiment. 

Mention of these great masculine "objective" 
writers brings me to my last word: which is, 
"Steep yourselves in them: habitually bring all to 
the test of them: for while you cannot escape 
the fate of all style, which is to be personal, the 



On Style 297 

more of catholic manhood you inherit from those 
great loins the more you will assuredly beget. " 

This then is Style. As technically manifested 
in Literature it is the power to touch with ease 
grace, precision, any note in the gamut of human 
thought or emotion. 

But essentially it resembles good manners. It 
comes of endeavouring to understand others, of 
thinking for them rather than for yourself — of 
thinking, that is, with the heart as well as the 
head. It gives rather than receives; it is nobly 
careless of thanks or applause, not being fed by 
these but rather sustained and continually re- 
freshed by an inward loyalty to the best. Yet, like 
"character" it has its altar within; to that retires 
for counsel, from that fetches its illumination, to 
ray outwards. Cultivate, Gentlemen, that habit 
of withdrawing to be advised by the best. So, 
says Fenelon, "you will find yourself infinitely 
quieter, your words will be fewer and more effec- 
tual; and while you make less ado, what you do 
will be more profitable. " 



INDEX 



Abelard, 245, 247, 255 
Abercrombie, Lascelles, 21 
Addison, Joseph, 151, 208 
Alcuin, 239, 240, 246 
Alfred, King, 225 
Aristophanes, 231, 232 
Aristotle, 154, 244, 272 
Arnold, Matthew, 43, 92, 156, 

224, 242 
Arte of Rhetorique, Wilson's, 

144 
Ascham, Roger, 147, 226 
Augustine, 238 

Bacon, Lord, 7, 8, 12, 264, 276 

Bagehot, Walter, 259 

Ballata, 55 

Barbour, John, 137 

Barrie, Sir James Matthew, 21, 

162 
Bede, 245 

Beerbohm, Max, 266 
Belisarius, 212 
Bentham, Jeremy, 117 
Beowulf, 193-200 
Beranger, Pierre- Jean de, 55 
Berners, Lord, 131-134, 146 
Bible, The: Authorized Version, 

65, 117, 118, 148 et seq., 170, 

1 7 1 , 1 74, 229 ; Revised Version, 

159-160 
Blair, Wilfred, 96 
Blake, William, 15 
Boccaccio, 222 
Boethius, 244 
Bologna, University of, 241, 

247 
Borneil, Giraud de, 218 
Boswell, James, 285 



Bridges, Robert, 23 

Brooke, the Rev. Stopford A. t 

193 

Brougham, Lord, 56, 123 
Browne, Sir Thomas, 12, 62, 

151, 204, 278 
Browning, Robert, 46, 224 
Buffon, 294 
Bunyan, John, 151 
Burke, Edmund, 33, 56, 57- 

64, 122, 123 
Burns, Robert, 55 
Butler, Arthur John, 24 

Casdmon, 198 
Cambridge, 241 et seq. 
Campion, Thomas, 223, 227 
Carducci, Giosue, 187-188 
Carlyle, Thomas, 22, 125, 294 
Cellini, Benvenuto, 48 
Cervantes, 9, 30 
Chad wick, Professor H. M., 

197 
Chair of English Literature, 

University Ordinance, 8, 9 
Chambers, E. K., 239 
Champeaux, William of, 247 
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 12, 134- 

136, 198, 221, 222, 262 
Chesterton, Gilbert K., 279 
Chichester, Richard of, 254 
Cicero, 34, 60 
Clare, John, 47 
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 48, 

77, 78, 79 
Conington, John, 208 
Courthope, W. J., 16, 192, 223, 

239 

Coverdale, Miles, 151 



299 



300 



Index 



Cowley, Abraham, 224 
Cowper, William, 224 
Crewe, Lord Chief Justice, 8 
Cynewulf, 198 

Daniel, Samuel, 223, 227 
Dante, 94, 222 
Darwin, Charles, 265 
Defoe, Daniel, 75, 91 
Dekker, Thomas, 79 
De la Mare, Walter, 284 
De Quincey, Thomas, 66 
Desiderius, Archbishop, 240 
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 

34 
Donne, John, 124, 129, 223 
Dryden, John, 208, 224, 272 
Duchess of Malfy, Webster's, 

121 
Dunbar, 12 

"Eliot, George," 13 
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 13 

Falconer, William, 95 

Falkner, J. Meade, 203-204 

Fenelon, 297 

FitzGerald, Edward, 117 

Flaubert, Gustave, 295, 296 

Fletcher, John, 16 

Fowler, H. W. and F. G., 109, 

166, 167 
Freeman, Professor E. A., 192, 

194, 211-216, 225 
Froissart, Berners', 131, 132 
Froude, James Anthony, 95 
Fuller, Thomas, 248 

Gibbon, Edward, 151, 259 

Gildas, 211 

Goethe, 125, 296 

Gray, Thomas, 13, 19, 163, 

191-192, 197 
Green, J. R., 192 
Green, T. H., 10 
Gregory the Great, Pope, 239, 

240 
Grierson, Professor H. J. C, 
. 223 



Hamilton, Sir William, 256 
Hardy, Thomas, 21 
Harris, Frank, 287 
Harvey, Gabriel, 223, 260 
Heine, Heinrich, 55 
Herbert, George, 160 
Hero and Leander, Marlowe's, 

118, 119 
Herodotus, 53, 77 
Homer, 30, 77, 84, 92-94, 96- 
T 98, 195, 229, 273-274 
Horace, 207-208 
Housman, Professor A. E., 266 

Ibsen, 117 
Irnerius, 247 
Isaiah, 157-160 

Jackson, Dr. Henry, 256 
Johnson, Samuel, 13, 14, 45, 

83, 84, 148, 208, 285 
Jonson, Ben, 155, 177, 223, 263 
Jowett, Benjamin, 35 
Jusserand, J. J., 220 
Juvenal, 208-209 

Keats, John, 19, 47, 224 
Kempis, Thomas a, 18 
Ker, Professor W. P., 194, 239 
Kipling, Rudyard, 74 

Lamb, Charles, 49 
Lessing, 98, 272, 292 
Lindsay, the Rev. T. M., D.D., 

144 
Lloyd George, the Right Hon. 

David, 165-166 
Lucian, 7, 194, 231, 273, 293 
Lucretius, 233 

Malory, Sir Thomas, 130-134, 

146 
Marlowe, Christopher, 118- 

121, 223, 263 
Marvell, Andrew, 224 
Mason, William, 191 
Masson, David, 15 _ 
McKenna, the Right Hon. 

Reginald, 164-165 
Meredith, George, 291 



Index 



301 



Milton, John, 1, 12, 19, 52, 68- 
75,89-92, 151, 184,223,235, 
285 
Minto, Professor William, 293 
Moore, Thomas, 55 
Morris, William, 227 
Mullinger, J. Bass, 246, 263 
Murray, Professor Gilbert, 232 

Nashe, Thomas, 146 
Newman, Cardinal, 6, 36, 37- 

39, 140, 141, 161, 173, 178, 

281 
Newton, Sir Isaac, 264 
Noyes, Alfred, 95 
Nut-Brown Maid, The, 136 

Oates, Captain, 50 
Origen, 235, 243 
Oxford, 241 et sea. 

Paris, University of, 241, 247 
Pater, Walter, 93, 266 
Patmore, Coventry, 294 
Payne, E. J., 122, 124 
Pervigilium Veneris, 183, 233 
Pheidias, 17 

Philosophy and Poetry, 1 
Piers Plowman, 198, 220 
Pilgrimage to Parnassus, The, 

260-264 
Plato, 1-5, 183, 246 
Pliny, 184-186 
Podsnap (see Freeman) 
Poggio, 246 
Pope, Alexander, 190, 191, 

197 
Powell, F. York, 193 
Provencal Song, 218-221 
Pythagoras, 250 

Quintilian, 35, 168, 288 

Raleigh, Professor Sir Walter, 

11 
Rashdall, Hastings, 250-252 
Remigius, 247 
Renan, 1 
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 28-29 



Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augus- 
tus, 24 

Saintsbury, Prof. George, 66- 
68, 225 

Salamanca, University of, 241 

Scott, The Antarctic Expe- 
dition, 50, 51 

Severus, Sulpicius, 239 

Shakespeare, William, 18, 19, 
30, 60, 61, 62-63, 1 18-122, 
138, 155, 156, 223, 229, 237, 
262, 263, 275, 295 

Shaw, George Bernard, 87 

Shelley, 48 

Shirley, James, 129 

Sidgwick, Henry, 278 

Sidney, Sir Philip, 50 

Skeat, Walter W., 15 

Sonata, 55 

South, Robert, 124 

Spenser, Edmund, 223, 248, 
260, 262 

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 160 

Stubbs, Bishop W., 54 

"Student's Handbook, The," 
87-88 

Swift, Jonathan, 75 

Swinburne, Algernon, 236 

Taylor, Jeremy, 83-84 
Tennyson, Lord, 90, 91, 224 
Tertullian, 235, 238, 243 
Thackeray, William Make- 
peace, 152 
Thompson, Francis, 288 
Thomson, James, 47 
Toulouse, University of, 250 
Tyndale, William, 148, 153, 
154 

Vacarius, 247 

Ventadour, Bernard de, 218, 

219 
Venus and Adonis, 11 8-120 
Verrall, Dr. A. W., 8 
Vigfusson, Gudbrand, 193 
Virgil, 30, 97, 233, 240 
Voltaire, 231 

Waller, Edmund, 1 



302 



Index 



Walpole, Horatio, 209 
Walton, Isaak, 84-86, 151, 242 
Warton, Thomas, 191, 192 
Watson, E. J., 188 
Watson, William, 19, 20 
Webster, John, 121 
Wendell, Barrett, 118 
Whistler, James McNeill, 282 
Whitman, Walt, 64, 65, 68 
Widsith, 72 
Wolfe, General, 163 



Wood, Anthony, 222 
Wordsworth, William, 13, 14, 
67,81,82,154,177,224,245, 

253 
Wright, Aldis, 15 
Wyat, Sir Thomas, 140-144, 

222 
Wyclif, John, 151, 154 

Yeats, William Butler, 171 
Young, Arthur, 205 



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